Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the Ecole de Paris, 1944-1964 is the first book dedicated to the postwar or 'nouvelle' Ecole de Paris. It challenges the customary relegation of the Ecole de Paris to the footnotes, not by arguing for some hitherto 'hidden' merit for the art and ideas associated with this school, but by establishing how and why the Ecole de Paris was a highly significant vehicle for artistic and political debate. The book presents a sustained historical study of how this 'school' was constituted by the paintings of a diverse group of artists, by the combative field of art criticism, and by the curatorial policies of galleries and state exhibitions. By thoroughly mining the extensive resources of the newspaper and art journal press, gallery and government archives, artists' writings and interviews with surviving artists and art critics, the book traces the artists, exhibitions, and art critical debates that made the Ecole de Paris a zone of aesthetic and political conflict. Through setting the Ecole de Paris into its artistic, social, and political context, Natalie Adamson demonstrates how it functioned as the defining force in French postwar art in its defence of the tradition of easel painting, as well as an international point of reference for the expansion of modernism. In doing so, she presents a wholly new perspective on the vexed relationships between painting, politics, and national identity in France during the two decades following World War II.

From the canonical texts of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the radical thinking of today's "DIY" movement, from theoretical writings on the position of craft in distinction to Art and Design to how-to texts from renowned practitioners, from feminist histories of textiles to descriptions of the innovation born of necessity in Soviet factories and African auto-repair shops...The Craft Reader presents the first comprehensive anthology of writings on modern craft. Covering the period from the Industrial Revolution to today, the Reader draws on craft practice and theory from America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The world of craft is considered in its full breadth -- from pottery and weaving, to couture and chocolate-making, to contemporary art, architecture and curation. The writings are themed into sections and all extracts are individually introduced, placing each in its historical, cultural and artistic context. Bringing together an astonishing range of both classic and contemporary texts, The Craft Reader will be invaluable to any student or practitioner of Craft and also to readers in Art and Design. AUTHORS INCLUDE: Theodor Adorno, Anni Albers, Amadou Hampate Ba, Charles Babbage, Roland Barthes, Andrea Branzi, Alison Britton, Rafael Cardoso, Johanna Drucker, Charles Eames, Salvatore Ferragamo, Kenneth Frampton, Alfred Gell, Walter Gropius, Tanya Harrod, Martin Heidegger, Patrick Heron, Bernard Leach, Esther Leslie, W. R. Lethaby, Lucy Lippard, Adolf Loos, Karl Marx, William Morris, Robert Morris, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Stefan Muthesius, George Nakashima, Octavio Paz, Grayson Perry, M. C. Richards, John Ruskin, Raphael Samuel, Ellen Gates Starr, Debbie Stoller, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lee Ufan, Frank Lloyd Wright

This book provides a social and cultural history of Jewish art in Nazi Germany, with a focus on the Jewish artists, art critics, and audiences in Nazi Bavaria. From the time of its conceptualization in the autumn of 1933 until its final curtain call in November 1938, the Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria sustained three departments: music, visual arts, and adult education. The Bavarian example steps outside the highly professional cultural milieu of Jewish Berlin, and instead looks at relatively unknown efforts of Bavarian Jewish artists as they used art to define what it now meant, to them, to be Jewish under Nazism. Insightful and engaging, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars interested in social and cultural histories of Jews in Germany.

Which objects or events will define the art of our time? Who will decide what is to be preserved for posterity and how that will be done? If an artist chooses ephemeral materials, should the work be allowed to deteriorate? These are among the questions posed in this proceedings volume, based on a conference on the preservation of contemporary art held at the Getty Center. Professionals from a range of disciplines discuss issues of the artist's original intent, the effect of the art market, ways to cope with rapidly evolving media technologies, and fine art as popular culture. Participants include the artists David Hockney and Judy Chicago, the philosopher Arthur Danto, collectors Agnes Gund and Clifford Einstein, and museum professionals Roy A. Perry (Tate Gallery), James Coddington (Museum of Modern Art), Peter Galassi (Museum of Modern Art), and John Hanhardt (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).

As the twenty-first century unfolds, notions of our cultural past and how our history has influenced our present shift almost daily. Within this, accepted artistic trajectories are being questioned and new connections made. In this wide-ranging and thought-provoking publication, experts in their field address specific aspects of British art of the twentieth century. Presenting new perspectives on established narratives, subjects range from British Surrealism and the rise of corporate and private patronage, to nationality and British identity. Complemented by a range of striking images, this publication succeeds in showing the strength of the British artistic tradition while also encouraging the reader to rethink and explore the existing narrative.

Chinese art has experienced its most profound metamorphosis since the early 1950s, transforming from humble realism to socialist realism, from revolutionary art to critical realism, then avant-garde movement, and globalized Chinese art. With a hybrid mix of Chinese philosophy, imported but revised Marxist ideology, and western humanities, Chinese artists have created an alternative approach - after a great ideological and aesthetic transition in the 1980s - toward its own contemporaneity though interacting and intertwining with the art of rest of the world. This book will investigate, from the perspective of an activist, critic, and historian who grew up prior to and participated in the great transition, and then researched and taught the subject, the evolution of Chinese art in modern and contemporary times. The volume will be a comprehensive and insightful history of the one of the most sophisticated and unparalleled artistic and cultural phenomena in the modern world.

"Remedios Varo: The Mexican Years" offers a definitive survey of the life and work of a singularly appealing and mysterious Surrealist painter. Born and raised in Spain, Remedios Varo received her earliest training in Madrid before fleeing the Spanish Civil War in 1937 to join Surrealist circles in Paris. The outbreak of World War II forced her to take refuge in Mexico, where she remained until her untimely death in 1963, and where she created her most enduring work. Known as one of the three "brujas" (witches) active in the Mexico City art milieu, Varo shared an interest in esotericism with fellow painter Leonora Carrington and a range of interests in science, philosophy and the literature of German Romanticism with the photographer Kati Horna. For some ten years, from the mid-1950s until her death in 1963, Varo devoted herself to creating an extraordinary dreamlike oeuvre, on the threshold between mysticism and modernity. Her beautifully crafted images of medieval interiors, occult workshops and androgynous figures engaged in alchemical pursuits evoke the eerie allegories of Hieronymus Bosch, esoteric engravings and the charm and lure of fairytales. This catalogue includes a complete illustrated chronology with never before published images and describes Varo's role in the Mexican Surrealist movement and her relations with Luis Bunuel, Octavio Paz, Benjamin Peret, Alice Rahon, Wolfgang Paalen and many others.
Remedios Varo (1908-1963) fled the Spanish Civil War and then World War II to settle in Mexico where she helped establish a Mexican Surrealist movement and painted visions that combined modernism with mysticism. She was married to the leading French Surrealist Benjamin Peret.

This book is a significant re-thinking of Duchamp's importance in the twenty-first century, taking seriously the readymade as a critical exploration of object-oriented relations under the conditions of consumer capitalism. The readymade is understood as an act of accelerating art as a discourse, of pushing to the point of excess the philosophical precepts of modern aesthetics on which the notion of art in modernity is based. Julian Haladyn argues for an accelerated Duchamp that speaks to a contemporary condition of art within our era of globalized capitalist production.

A sumptuous single-volume edition of Phaidon's acclaimed overview of one of the greatest painters of our time Larger-than-life British artist Lucian Freud enjoyed a career lasting over seven decades. He worked almost until the day he died, when he left a portrait of friend and studio assistant David Dawson unfinished. Now available for the first time in one elegantly combined edition, this acclaimed celebration of Freud's work from the 1930s to his death in 2011 includes hundreds of paintings, drawings, sketches, and etchings - even personal photographs and illustrated private letters. A comprehensive overview of his life and work in one luxurious volume, this book is a gorgeous addition to the shelves of art lovers everywhere. Created in collaboration with the Lucian Freud Archive and David Dawson, Director of the Archive, and edited by Mark Holborn.

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

The story of two legendary designers who made "modern America" From the 1920s through the 1950s, two individuals, Joseph Urban and Norman Bel Geddes, did more, by far, to create the image of "America" and make it synonymous with modernity than any of their contemporaries. Urban and Bel Geddes were leading Broadway stage designers and directors who turned their prodigious talents to other projects, becoming mavericks first in industrial design and then in commercial design, fashion, architecture, and more. The two men gave shape to the most quintessential symbols of the modern American lifestyle, including movies, cars, department stores, and nightclubs, along with private homes, kitchens, stoves, fridges, magazines, and numerous household furnishings. Illustrated with more than 130 photographs of their influential designs, this book tells the engrossing story of Urban and Bel Geddes. Christopher Innes shows how these two men with a background in theater lent dramatic flair to everything they designed and how this theatricality gave the distinctive modernity they created such wide appeal. If the American lifestyle has been much imitated across the globe over the past fifty years, says Innes, it is due in large measure to the designs of Urban and Bel Geddes. Together they were responsible for creating what has been called the "Golden Age" of American culture.

Based on hitherto overlooked archival material, this book reveals Nell Walden's significant impact on the Sturm organisation through a feminist reading of supportive labour that highlights the centrality of collaborative work within the modern art world. This book introduces Walden as an ardent collector of modern and indigenous art and critically contextualises her own art production in relation to expressionist concepts of art and to gendered ideas on abstraction and decoration. Visual analyses highlight how she collaborated with professional and experimental women photographers during the Weimar era and how the circulation of these photographs served as a means to intervene in the public sphere of culture in interwar Germany. Finally, the book provides an analysis of Walden's continuing work for Der Sturm after her voluntary exile from Germany to Switzerland in 1933 and highlights the importance of women's supportive labour for the canonisation and institutionalisation of modern art in museums and archives. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, and gender studies.

Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century provides a unique and authoritative guide to modern responses to art. Featuring 48 essays on major twentieth-century writers and thinkers, and written by an international panel of expert contributors, it introduces readers to the key approaches and analytical tools of contemporary art study and debate, including iconography, formalism, Marxism, feminism, semiotics, Freudian psychoanalysis, object-relations theory, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, and deconstruction.
Each entry includes:
* a critical essay
* a short biography
* a bibliography listing both primary and secondary texts
Unique in its range and accessibly written, this book, together with its companion volume Key Writers on Art: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, provides an invaluable guide for students as well as general readers with an interest in art history, aesthetics and visual culture.

The Handbook of International Futurism is the first reference work ever to presents in a comparative fashion all media and countries in which the movement, initiated by F.T. Marinetti in 1909, exercised a particularly noteworthy influence. The handbook offers a synthesis of the state of scholarship regarding the international radiation of Futurism and its influence in some fifteen artistic disciplines and thirty-eight countries. While acknowledging the great achievements of the movement in the visual and literary arts of Italy and Russia, it treats Futurism as an international, multidisciplinary phenomenon that left a lasting mark on the manifold artistic manifestations of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Hundreds of artists, who in some phase in their career absorbed Futurist ideas and stylistic devices, are presented in the context of their national traditions, their international connections and the media in which they were predominantly active. The handbook acts as a kind of multi-disciplinary, geographical encyclopaedia of Futurism and gives scholars with varying levels of experience a detailed overview of all countries and disciplines in which the movement had a major impact.

By studying the importance of specialist art periodicals in creating the artistic, economic and cultural-historical value of modern art and visual culture, this volume is dedicated to the history and legacy of specialist art reviews, bulletins, and magazines across Europe-and their echoes elsewhere-in the early to mid-twentieth century. It assembles historical case studies on European modern art periodicals (British, French, German, Belgian, Finnish, Danish), presenting new research on the multiple meanings that such specialist publications assume within the history of modern art. Paying special attention to the interdependence of the art market and the art press, and reflecting upon the fresh insights that new forms of reading bring, each chapter adds to our historical understanding of the modern art review.

This book is focused on the transcultural memory of the Mediterranean region and the different ways it is articulated by contemporary art practices and museum projects linked to migrations, exile, diaspora and transnationality. The artistic and curatorial examples analysed in this study articulate a critical relationship between the cultural representations and the sense of heritage, property and belonging, offering the opportunity of a more problematic and stimulating vision of the preservation of the European arts, traditions and histories. Artists and projects examined include the project Porto M in Lampedusa, Zineb Sedira, Ursula Biemann, Lara Baladi, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Kader Attia and Walid Raad.

A fascinating journey through Western art from the 1910s to the 1960s, charting how artists wrestled with the headlong changes of a turbulent and conflict-ridden world From the chaos of the First World War to the ravages of the Second, from the Great Depression to the rise of consumer culture, artists we call "modern" faced the challenge of responding imaginatively to utterly new circumstances of life. Original thought, startling artistic techniques, and new attitudes to experimentation were required to produce exceptional and timely work. Make It Modern guides the reader through the art of the modern world. Works of celebrated artists, from Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky to Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock, and Yayoi Kusama, alongside a panoply of undervalued or less-known figures, populate this decade-by-decade narrative. Make It Modern tells an unforgettable story of how art was changed forever.

Circle: "God is a circle whose center is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere." Circle means perfection, cyclicity, superiority of the divinity, but also instability and movement. In nature soap bubbles are spherical and internal trees' rings are circular; the legend tells that Giotto drew a perfect O, while perfection is tangible on Michelangelo's Tondo Doni and Botticelli's Vergine col Bambino. King Arthur's knights were pairs around a round table, and nowadays people sit in circle to make a decision or watch a show. Bruno Munari selects and describes in this little, extraordinary encyclopedia, several uses of this fascinating and mysterious form, unstable and hieratic at the same time. Square: Square has much importance in man's life: a lot of churches, monuments, games (like chess), and fonts are square-based. But man seems not to realise it... one more time Bruno Munari amazes us with an historical, anthropological, scientific square book. Triangle: From the vegetable structure of the coconut to the diagram of human settlements by Le Corbusier, one can frequently find the shape of the equilateral triangle in many different occurrences, both in a natural environment and in artificial works. Along with the circle and the square, the equilateral triangle is one of the three basic forms, and is suitable to be combined in modular frameworks to generate a structured field in which endless other combinatorial forms may be constructed. From classical Arab and Japanese decorations to the contemporary architecture of Buckminster Fuller and Wright, the familiarity with the equilateral triangle, in all its formal and structural resources, generates curious and fascinating experimentations. After the books of the same collection dedicated to the circle and the square, a new reprint by Bruno Munari about the many uses of this evocative shape throughout the centuries. These studies were originally published in 1976 in the series Quaderni di design, curated by Munari himself for Zanichelli.

Ranging from early twentieth century modernist appropriations of non-western art through to the ways in which Mexican muralists in the 1930s negotiated European avant-gardist strategies, and then up to contemporary installation and lens-based practices during the current period of globalisation, this book seeks to understand selected moments in the art of the last one hundred years through the prism of postcolonialism. -- .

J. D. Fergusson (1874-1961) is one of the four artists known as the Scottish Colourists, the others being F. C. B. Cadell, G. L. Hunter and S. J. Peploe. Fergusson was born in Leith, and was essentially a self-taught artist. In Paris 1907 he became involved with the avant-garde scene and exhibited at the progressive Salon d'Automne. More than any of his Scottish contemporaries, Fergusson assimilated and developed the latest developments in French painting. In 1913 Fergusson met the dance pioneer Margaret Morris (1891-1980). Morris's creative dance movements and her students continued to be one of Fergusson's main sources of inspiration and models. In 1929 Fergusson returned to Paris where he was involved with the Anglo-American art circles. Most summers were spent in the south of France where Morris held her celebrated Summer Schools. The couple moved to Glasgow in 1939 being founder members of the New Art Club and of its off-shoot the New Scottish Group. This book reasserts the artist's place at the forefront of British modernism.

Arriving in New York City in the first decade of the twentieth century, six painters-Robert Henri, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Glackens, George Luks, and George Bellows, subsequently known as the Ashcan Circle-faced a visual culture that depicted the urban man as a diseased body under assault. Ashcan artists countered this narrative, manipulating the bodies of construction workers, tramps, entertainers, and office workers to stand in visual opposition to popular, political, and commercial cultures. They did so by repeatedly positioning white male bodies as having no cleverness, no moral authority, no style, and no particular charisma, crafting with consistency an unspectacular man. This was an attempt, both radical and deeply insidious, to make the white male body stand outside visual systems of knowledge, to resist the disciplining powers of commercial capitalism, and to simply be with no justification or rationale. Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man maps how Ashcan artists reconfigured urban masculinity for national audiences and reimagined the possibility and privilege of the unremarkable white, male body thus shaping dialogues about modernity, gender, and race that shifted visual culture in the United States.

Drawing on expertise in art history, exhibition studies and cultural studies as well as politics and international relations, China in Australasia presents significant new perspectives on the role of art in the cultural diplomacy of the People's Republic of China. The book tells the forgotten story of the loan, exchange, and gifting of Chinese art, museum exhibitions-and the use of Chinese arts more broadly-in growing diplomatic relations with Australia and New Zealand, from 1949 to the present day. Its scope includes pre-modern, modern and contemporary sculpture, painting and peasant art, as well as ancient artefacts, performance arts and gardens. In considering the geopolitical connections opened by the arts, this book presents new insights into some of the ways in which China, often in conjunction with local supporters, sought to present itself to the people of Australia and New Zealand. It also considers how, for their part, New Zealanders and Australians worked to expand understandings of their powerful northern neighbour within changing political contexts. The first of its kind, this book-length interdisciplinary study of Chinese soft diplomacy in Australasia will be invaluable to students and scholars of Chinese studies, cultural diplomacy, museum studies and art history.

Today, nearly a century after the National Fascist Party came to power in Italy, questions about the built legacy of the regime provoke polemics among architects and scholars. Mussolini's government constructed thousands of new buildings across the Italian Peninsula and islands and in colonial territories. From hospitals, post offices and stadia to housing, summer camps, Fascist Party Headquarters, ceremonial spaces, roads, railways and bridges, the physical traces of the regime have a presence in nearly every Italian town. The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture investigates what has become of the architectural and urban projects of Italian fascism, how sites have been transformed or adapted and what constitutes the meaning of these buildings and cities today. The essays include a rich array of new arguments by both senior and early career scholars from Italy and beyond. They examine the reception of fascist architecture through studies of destruction and adaptation, debates over reuse, artistic interventions and even routine daily practices, which may slowly alter collective understandings of such places. Paolo Portoghesi sheds light on the subject from his internal perspective, while Harald Bodenschatz situates Italy among period totalitarian authorities and their symbols across Europe. Section editors frame, synthesize and moderate essays that explore fascism's afterlife; how the physical legacy of the regime has been altered and preserved and what it means now. This critical history of interpretations of fascist-era architecture and urban projects broadens our understanding of the relationships among politics, identity, memory and place. This companion will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including Italian history, architectural history, cultural studies, visual sociology, political science and art history.