Giacometti: Critical Essays brings together new studies by an international team of scholars who together explore the whole span of Alberto Giacometti's work and career from the 1920s to the 1960s. During this complex period in France's intellectual history, Giacometti's work underwent a series of remarkable stylistic shifts while he forged close affiliations with an equally remarkable set of contemporary writers and thinkers. This book throws new light on under-researched aspects of his output and approach, including his relationship to his own studio, his work in the decorative arts, his tomb sculptures and his use of the pedestal. It also focuses on crucial ways his work was received and articulated by contemporary and later writers, including Michel Leiris, Francis Ponge, Isaku Yanaihara and Tahar Ben Jelloun. This book thus engages with energising tensions and debates that informed Giacometti's work, including his association with both surrealism and existentialism, his production of both 'high' art and decorative objects, and his concern with both formal issues, such as scale and material, and with the expression of philosophical and poetic ideas. This multifaceted collection of essays confirms Giacometti's status as one of the most fascinating artists of the twentieth century.

Although cultural exchanges were named within the Council of Europe in the mid- 1950s as being second only in importance to the military as a tool for ensuring a stable and integrated Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, European-led initiatives have generally been overlooked in the historiography of art of the immediate post-war period. Popularly remembered as the era of the United States' cultural 'triumph', American Abstract Expressionism in particular is commonly identified as the cultural 'weapon' by which that nation conquered Western European culture. Using the Venice Biennale as a case study, this book challenges the idea that there was an American cultural conquest in the 1950s through the fine arts, arguing instead that Western Europe retained a strong sense of world cultural leadership in the immediate post-war years. An institutional history that combines political and diplomatic with art history, and is informed by extensive archival research, it argues that Italian political and cultural figures actively promoted the 'Idea of Europe' - the Council of Europe's cultural initiative of 1955 designed to promote the idea of a homogeneous post-war European culture - at the Biennale in the form of gesture painting as an international style, as the emblem of a culturally united Western Europe, and as the repository of universal humanist values for the international community. Scholarly but accessible, this book will be of interest not only to researchers and to students of international cultural relations during the Cold War, but to general, interested readers, too. -- .

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is arguably Japan's most famous living artist. Her originality, innovation and powerful desire to communicate have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades. During this time, Kusama has explored painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance and installation, as well as product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition she has recently achieved. Now in her eightieth year, she continues to make art, extending the range of her large-scale, dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-painting extensive series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings. Kusama has exhibited widely around the world, including representing Japan at the Venice Biennale, and her work is in many major collections. Accompanying the first major retrospective exhibition of the artist's work to be staged in the UK, this lavishly illustrated book features an introductory essay by Tate curator Frances Morris as well as four other substantial essays by leading international critics. Topics covered include Kusama's time in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and an exploration of her art from a psychoanalytical point of view.

In studies of psychology's role in modernism, Carl Jung is usually relegated to a cameo appearance, if he appears at all. This book rethinks his place in modernist culture during its formative years, mapping Jung's influence on a surprisingly vast transatlantic network of artists, writers, and thinkers. Jay Sherry sheds light on how this network grew and how Jung applied his unique view of the image-making capacity of the psyche to interpret such modernist icons as James Joyce and Pablo Picasso. His ambition to bridge the divide between the natural and human sciences resulted in a body of work that attracted a cohort of feminists and progressives involved in modern art, early childhood education, dance, and theater.

The Reverend Howard Finster (1916 2001) was called the backwoods William Blake" and the Andy Warhol of the South," and he is considered the godfather of contemporary American folk and visionary art. This book is the first interpretive analysis of the intertwined artistic and religious significance of Finster's work within the context of the American outsider art" tradition. Finster began preaching as a teenager in the South in the 1930s. But it was not until he received a revelation from God at the age of sixty that he began to make sacred art. A modern-day Noah who saw his art as a religious crusade to save the world before it was too late, Finster worked around the clock, often subsisting on a diet of peanut butter and instant coffee. He spent the last years of his life feverishly creating his environmental artwork called Paradise Garden and what would ultimately number almost fifty thousand works of bad and nasty art." This was visionary work that obsessively combined images and text and featured apocalyptic biblical imagery, flying saucers from outer space, and popular cultural icons such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Henry Ford, Mona Lisa, and George Washington. In the 1980s and 90s, he developed cult celebrity status, and he appeared in the Venice Biennale and on the Tonight Show. His work graced the album covers of bands such as R.E.M. and Talking Heads. This book explores the life and religious-artistic significance of Finster and his work from the personal perspective of religion scholar Norman Girardot, friend to Finster and his family during the later years of the artist's life.

Claud Lovat Fraser - universally known as Lovat - is one of the great unsung heroes of twentieth-century British design. During his short life of just thirty-one years, five of which were disrupted by the Great War, he achieved an astonishing amount of work as draughtsman, watercolourist, caricaturist, publisher, illustrator, designer of stage-sets, toys and fabrics: he also designed silks for Liberty's, cretonnes for Foxton's, advertising material for Eno's, MacFisheries, Gurr Johns and Atkinson's, and book-jackets for Heinemann and Nelson, among others. His inimitable style and psychedelic palette became the hallmark of both the Curwen Press and the Poetry Bookshop, but he is best remembered today, by those who are aware of him at all, for his poster, costume and set-designs for Nigel Playfair's 1920 production of 'The Beggar's Opera' at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.

Fair Women was the Victorian equivalent of a 'blockbuster' exhibition. Organised by a committee of women, it opened to great fanfare in the Grafton Galleries in London, and was comprised of both historical and contemporary portraits of women as well as decorative objects. Meaghan Clarke argues that the exhibition challenged contemporary assumptions about the representation of women and the superficiality of female collectors. The Fair Women phenomenon complicated gender stereotypes and foregrounded women as cultural arbiters. This book uncovers a wide range of texts and images to reveal that Fair Women brought together fashion, modernity and gender politics in new and surprising ways. It shows that, while invariably absent in institutional histories, women were vital to the development of the modern blockbuster exhibition. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender studies, museum studies, feminist art history, women artists and art history.

'A joy to read.' Sunday Times 'Outstanding.' Daily Telegraph 'Excellent.' The Spectator 'Superb.' Literary Review 'Scintillating . . . A gripping, mysterious love story which also sheds light on British culture between the wars.' Financial Times In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four-year-old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts - streamlined, full of movement and brilliant colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Theirs was a scintillating world of Futurists, Surrealists and pioneering abstraction, but alongside the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, shops and sport and dance, they also looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight.

What do we mean when we claim affinity with an object or picture, or say affinities exist between such things? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or allyship, but has aspects of all. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, this book is first of all about images that have stayed with the author over many years, or grown in significance during months of pandemic isolation, when the visual field had shrunk. Some are historical works by artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol. Others are scientific or vernacular images: sea creatures, migraine auras, astronomical illustrations derived from dreams. Also family photographs, film stills, records of atomic ruin. And contemporary art by Rinko Kawauchi, Susan Hiller and John Stezaker. Written as a series of linked essays, interwoven with a reflection on affinity itself, Affinities is an extraordinary book about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking.

This book examines collecting around the world and how women have participated in and formed collections globally. The edited volume builds on recent research and offers a wider lens through which to examine and challenge women's collecting histories. Spanning from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first (although not organized chronologically) the research herein extends beyond European geographies and across time periods; it brings to light new research on how artificiallia and naturallia were collected, transported, exchanged, and/or displayed beyond Europe. Women, Collecting and Cultures Beyond Europe considers collections as points of contact that forged transcultural connections and knowledge exchange. Some authors focus mainly on collectors and what was collected, while others consider taxonomies, travel, patterns of consumption, migration, markets, and the after life of things. In its broad and interdisciplinary approach, this book amplifies women's voices, and aims to position their collecting practices toward new transcultural directions, including women's relation to distinct cultures, customs, and beliefs as well as exposing the challenges women faced when carving a place for themselves within global networks. This study will be of interest to scholars working in collections and collecting, conservation, museum studies, art history, women's studies, material and visual cultures, Indigenous studies, textile histories, global studies, history of science, social and cultural histories.

"Designs on Modernity" presents the 1925 Paris Exhibition as a key moment in attempts to update the image of Paris as "capital of the 19th century." At the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris itself, as much as the commodity, was put on show. Tag Gronberg focuses on the Exhibition as a set of contesting representations of the modern city, stressing the importance of consumption and display for concepts of urban modernity. Here Le Corbusier's now famous Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau with its Plan Voisin for the redesign of Paris confronted another equally up-to-date city: Paris as "a woman's city," world centre of fashion and shopping. Taking as her starting point one of the most dramatic 1925 exhibits, the rue des Boutiques which spanned the river Seine, Gronberg analyses the contemporary significance of the small Parisian luxury shop. She shows how boutiques, conceived both as urbanism and as advertising, redefined Paris as the modern city.

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.

In 1939, Scottish artist and sculptor J.D. Fergusson was commissioned to write a fully illustrated book on modern Scottish painting. The Second World War made this difficult and the first edition of Modern Scottish Painting was published in 1943 without illustrations. This new edition – edited, introduced and annotated by Alexander Moffat and Alan Riach – finally brings Fergusson’s project to fruition, illustrating the argument with colour reproductions of Fergusson’s own work. Moffat and Riach frame Fergusson’s important art manifesto for the 21st-century reader, illuminating his views on modern art as he explores questions of technique, education, form and what it means for a painting to be truly modern. Fergusson relates these aspects of modern painting to Scottishness, showing what they mean for Scottish identity, nationalism, independence and the legacy that puritanical Calvinism has left on Scottish art – a particular concern for Fergusson given his recurring subject matter of the female nude.

This is the first full-length study about the British artist Roy Ascott, one of the first cybernetic artists, with a career spanning seven decades to date. The book focuses on his early career, exploring the evolution of his early interests in communication in the context of the rich overlaps between art, science and engineering in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. The first part of the book looks at Ascott's training and early work. The second park looks solely at Groundcourse, Ascott's extraordinary pedagogical model for visual arts and cybernetics which used an integrative and systems-based model, drawing in behaviourism, analogue machines, performance and games. Using hitherto unpublished photographs and documents, this book will establish a more prominent place for cybernetics in post-war British art.

Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design challenges the received narrative on the artists, exhibitions, and interpretations of Viennese Modernism. The book centers on three main erasures-the erasure of Jewish artists and critics; erasures relating to gender and sexual identification; and erasures of other marginalized figures and movements. Restoring missing elements to the story of the visual arts in early twentieth-century Vienna, authors investigate issues of gender, race, ethnic and sexual identity, and political affiliation. Both well-studied artists and organizations-such as the Secession and the Austrian Werkbund, and iconic figures such as Klimt and Hoffmann-are explored, as are lesser known figures and movements. The book's thought-provoking chapters expand the chronological contours and canon of artists surrounding Viennese Modernism to offer original, nuanced, and rich readings of individual works, while offering a more diverse portrait of the period from 1890, through World War II and into the present. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history, design history, architectural history, and European studies.

Pablo Picasso andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo . . . so many great artists have shared one very special love: the companionship of cats. Gathered here for the first time are behind-thescenes stories of more than 50 famous artists and their feline friends. From Salvador Dali's pet ocelot Babou to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's menagerie of cats, including Salt (who was black) and Pepper (who was white), Artists and Their Cats captures these endearing friendships in charming photographs and engaging text and reveals what creative souls and the animals best known for their independent spirits have in common. In this clever compilation, art aficionados will discover a softer side of their favourite artists and cat lovers will enjoy a whole new way to celebrate their favourite furry friends.

This book presents an original study on how contemporary artists are exploring urban spaces through mapping. Despite a long history of representations of cities in maps, and the relationships that can be envisaged between art maps and cities in the contemporary world, little research is dedicated to investigating how artists intervene in the realm of urban cartography. The research examines a century-old history of art maps and draws on academic debates challenging traditional notions of maps as scientific artefacts produced through accurate measurement and surveying. The potential of art maps to construct personal narratives, through contestation, embodiment and play, is analysed in the city context, where spaces are shaped by urban planning and design, political ideologies and socio-economic forces. Adopting an exploratory and interpretative research approach that investigates the confluence of theories originated in different domains, this book conducts the reader to discover what artistic practices can bring into a more creative, while inquisitive, understanding of cities. A series of semi-structured interviews with visual artists, enquiring how they apprehend, process and re-create urban spaces in artworks, explores cartographic process and methods in visual art practices in the twenty first century, which incorporates digital technologies and critical thinking.

This is the first overview of cartoon art in this important cultural nexus of Asia. The eight chapters provide historical and present-day overviews of cartoons and comics in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and sociocultural and political analyses of cartooning in Singapore, Myanmar, and Malaysia. The volume benefits from firsthand accounts gleaned from hundreds of interviews with Southeast Asia's major cartoonists, conducted by the four authors, as well as textual analyses of specific cartoons, on-the-spot observations, and close scrutiny of historical documents. All genres of printed cartoon art are studied, including political and humour cartoons, newspaper comic strips, comic books, and humour/cartoon periodicals. A sense of trends and problems offers topics for further discussion and comparison with cartoon art of other parts of the globe. Among such topics are national identity, transnational public sphere, globalization, alternative media forms, freedom of expression, consumerism, and corporatism. Southeast Asian cartoon art has a number of features unique to the region, such as having as pioneering cartoonists three countries' founding fathers, comics that gave their name to a national trait, some of the earliest graphic novels worldwide, and a king who hired a cartoonist to illustrate his books.

Designed to be a companion to our classic title 1000 Chairs, this edition contains an awesome selection of over 1000 lights. Presented chronologically by decade are the 20th century's most interesting electric lights, from Tiffany's beautiful leaded-glass shades to completely outrageous designs from the late 1960s and 1970s to the latest high-tech LED lamps. All major styles are represented here-Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern Movement, De Stijl, Postwar, Pop, Radical, Postmodern, and Contemporary-in 640 pages of truly illuminated works. This definitive reference work is a must-have for collectors and design fans. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

This book reevaluates the art of Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) in relation to his efforts to achieve belonging in the face of West Germany's increasing individualism between the 1960s and the 1990s. Richter fled East Germany in 1961 to escape the constraints of socialist collectivism. His varied and extensive output in the West attests to his greater freedom under capitalism, but also to his struggles with belonging in a highly individualised society, a problem he was far from alone in facing. The dynamic of increasing individualism has been closely examined by sociologists, but has yet to be employed as a framework for understanding broader trends in recent German art history. Rather than critique this development from a socialist perspective or experiment with new communal structures like a number of his colleagues, Richter sought and found security in traditional modes of bourgeois collectivity, like the family, religion, painting and the democratic capitalist state. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history as well as German history, culture and politics.

Over the past years, studies have begun not only to identify the factors that impeded the full participation of women artists in French cultural life, such as women's limited access to professional art education, but also to bring to light the considerable artistic accomplishments of women occluded by historians for over a century. A similar effort at historical revision has been under way for French women writers. Works of fiction that enjoyed many editions in the nineteenth-century receded from our field of vision for almost a century before being rediscovered and reissued during the last decades of the twentieth century. Such efforts have resulted in scholarship that has helped revise the history of both artistic and literary expression in nineteenth-century France. Similarly, many women in nineteenth-century France had their art criticism published both in journal reviews and in book form, often for decades, in a number of the most influential venues of their day. However, it is perplexing that they remain almost totally invisible in histories of French culture. Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Acts is the first sustained effort to bring these prolific and influential critics out from the shadows. Although each of the chapters in this volume results from an interdisciplinary approach, the fact that they are written by scholars in art history and in literature means that there will be inevitable differences in approach and methodology. Thus, we study the women's reception of specific artworks and aesthetic movements, discuss intersections of aesthetics and politics in their essays and the literary styles and rhetorical strategies of individual critics, explore the social conditions that allowed or impeded their successes, and suggest reasons for their all but disappearance in the twentieth century. In bringing to light for twenty-first-century readers the "vanished" writings of heretofore unrecognized or underrecognized women art critics, the authors hope to contribute to the ongoing revision of women's role in cultural history. The multifaceted approaches to word/image studies modeled in this book, and the many avenues for further research it identifies, will inspire scholars in a number of disciplines to continue the work of reinscribing women in the history of cultural life.

Taking citizenship as a political position, cultural process, and intertwining of both, this edited volume examines the role of visual art and visual culture as sites for the construction and contestation of both state-sanctioned and cultural citizenships from the late 1970s to today. Contributors to this book examine an assortment of visual media-painting, sculpture, photography, performance, the built environment, new media, and social practice-within diverse and international communities, such as the United States, South Africa, Turkey, and New Zealand. Topics addressed include, but are not limited to, citizenship in terms of: nation building, civic practices, border zones, transnationalism, statelessness, and affects of belonging as well as alternate forms of, or resistance to, citizenship.