Based on original archival research, Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. It investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and its multiculturality influenced and shaped visual culture and cinema. Countering Eurocentric modernity paradigms and reframing hierarchical relations between centres and peripheries, this book adopts an alternative methodology for interstitial spaces. By deploying the notion of the haptic, it establishes new connections between moving image artefacts and print media, early film practitioners, the socio-political context and cultural responses to the new visual medium.

Is contemporary art a friend or foe of Christianity? In "God in the Gallery" art historian, critic, and curator Daniel Siedell constructs a framework for interpreting modern art from a Christian worldview. He contends that art is not antithetical or hostile to Christianity but is in resonant dialogue with it. Siedell also examines the function of art criticism and the role of visual art in Christian worship and experience.

"Dan Siedell is an exceptionally thoughtful and articulate observer of the very difficult intersection of religious belief and contemporary art. The book is full of unexpected and promising confluences. Here a reader will find the principal secular theorists of modernism, but this book is also 'nourished by Nicene Christianity' and informed by a wonderful range of authors, from Florensky, Levinas, and Wyschogrod to Seerveld, Wolterstorff, Walford, and Dyrness. This is a tremendous book, a genuine effort at dialogue in an arena marked by the near-complete absence of open exchange."--James Elkins, E. C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

""God in the Gallery" is a seminal work of interpretation, a guide for skeptics and faithful alike, in which Siedell offers a most profound, encouraging survey of contemporary art. An Emmaus Road encounter for those traveling on the path of contemporary art, Siedell's careful and loving attention paid to known and unknown artists will surely open our eyes. A must read for all of us laboring in the art world and in the arts academia."--Makoto Fujimura, artist; founder/creative director, International Arts Movement

"Daniel Siedell's passionate appreciationfor common grace is apparent on every page of "God in the Gallery," This is a book that should be widely read not only for its penetrating account of the contemporary art world but also for its larger understanding of Christ and culture."--John Wilson, editor, "Books & Culture"

This book investigates creative responses to the Nazi period in the work of three artists, Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani, focusing on their use of pictorial narrative. It analyses their contrasting aesthetic strategies and their innovative forms of artistic production. In contrast with the autonomous, modernist art object, their works were explicitly linked with the historical conditions under which they were produced ? the pressures of persecution and exile. Conditions in the slave labour camps and ghettos in the Ukraine, which shaped the paintings and drawings of Daghani, are contrasted with the experiences of exile in Belgium and France, which inspired Nussbaum and Salomon. In defiance of conventional artistic practice, they produced word-image combinations that can be read as narrative sequences, incorporating specific references to political events. While there has been a wealth of literary, philosophical and historical studies relating to the Holocaust, aesthetic debate has developed less extensively. This is the first comparative study of three artists who are only belatedly achieving recognition and the recent reception of their work is evaluated. By identifying the aesthetic principles and narrative strategies underlying their work, the book reassesses their achievement in creating new forms of modernism with an unmistakable political momentum.

This book was published as a special issue of Word & Image.

With more than 14,000 entries of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, this book is the most comprehensive international listing of artists as illustrators compiled to date. The entries include illustrators, sculptors, and fine art artists who have done illustrations for books, magazines, records, and posters. Biographical reference keys are provided with each entry. Approximately 4,000 of the listed artists are shown with a signature facsimile.

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.

Traces the evolution of Matisse's work on paper, from experimental beginnings to the artist's instantly recognizable mature style An internationally recognized expert in the European tradition of draughtsmanship, Christopher Lloyd offers rare insights about the technical qualities of Matisse's drawings. This book traces the evolution of Matisse's large and varied body of drawings and works on paper-including graphic work, the celebrated cut-outs and the famous decoration of the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, France. The artist's drawings are contextualized within his own biography and times, from vibrant early twentieth-century Paris to later periods in luxurious Nice. Lively prose and a wealth of reproductions illustrate Matisse's versatility in different media and his innovative, expansive concept of drawing. Despite the variety of his output, the work always reflects the artist's constant desire to express pure emotion in visual terms. Since 2014, Christopher Lloyd has published four highly successful books on the drawings of modern artists. This book follows his most recent publication, Picasso and the Art of Drawing. With over 150 illustrations, including archival photographs of Matisse's studio and the artist at work, this volume concisely covers Matisse's entire graphic oeuvre. Distributed for Modern Art Press

The jewel-like watercolours of renowned Irish botanical artist Wendy Walsh portray a personal selection of about 100 plants that grow wild in Ireland or are cultivated in Irish gardens. Presented in 33 thematic sections,Walsh's subjects range from well-loved and distinctive native plants to exotic species introduced from the New World and Asia, unusual plants that grow in some of the most extreme environments in Ireland, and striking hybrids created by plant breeders. Lively and accessible horticultural descriptions by distinguished botanist E. Charles Nelson accompany the paintings, celebrating the story of each plant along with its natural beauty. The great gardens, famous plantsmen, fascinating journeys and natural phenomena that have shaped the flora of Ireland spring to life in Dr Nelson's engaging text. This elegant and unconventional guide will kindle the imagination of any plant lover or admirer of the Irish landscape.

* A Times and New Statesman Book of the Year * * BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week * * Illustrated with over 130 colour photographs and drawings * 'A masterpiece.' Edmund de Waal 'Commanding, intelligent, gripping.' The Times From 1910 to 1930 Gropius was at the very centre of European modern art and design, as the founder of the German art school, the Bauhaus. Yet Gropius's beliefs and affiliations left him little choice but to leave Germany when Hitler came to power. In this riveting book, Fiona MacCarthy draws on new research to re-evaluate Gropius's work and life. From his shattering experiences in the First World War to his turbulent marriage to the notorious Alma Mahler and the tragic early death of their daughter, MacCarthy leads us through his disorientating years in London, to his final peaceful and productive life in America. This is biography at its finest and most vivid.

In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century. While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany's barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past. Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.

Modern Art Culture: A Reader provides an essential resource for understanding the culture of modern art since the 1960s. In recent years, media theorists and historians have asked whether works of imaginative art can have any impact in our image-saturated culture. Given the power of institutions, how do radical artists produce effective cultural interventions? In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, many argue that pressing questions about works of art and their meanings are inseparable not only from contemporary social and political issues but also from major debates and developments in the last four decades. To explore such questions and issues, the Reader is divided into six related parts with articles from journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues that exemplify important interventions from the 1960s onwards: Histories, Representations and Remembrance; Art and Visual/Mass/Popular Culture; Institutions; Inclusions/Exclusions; Bodies and Identities; Power and Permissibility. Texts range from artists' engagement with the veil and veiling as metaphors for post-colonialist understandings of representation and contemporary art to early debates about, for example, 'activist art', discourses of the 'body', civil rights, ethnicity, and cultural power. Importantly these selected texts offer examples of analysis that can enable readers to examine, critically, their own selection of representations produced in a variety of contexts.

This book examines the work of several modern artists, including Fortunato Depero, Scipione, and Mario Radice, who were working in Italy during the time of Benito Mussolini's rise and fall. It provides a new history of the relationship between modern art and fascism. The study begins from the premise that Italian artists belonging to avant-garde art movements, such as futurism, expressionism, and abstraction, could produce works that were perfectly amenable to the ideologies of Mussolini's regime. A particular focus of the book is the precise relationship between ideas of history and modernity encountered in the art and politics of the time and how compatible these truly were.

Kay Fisker (1893-1965) is considered one of the most influential Danish architects of the twentieth century, and yet there has existed until now no in-depth English-language study of his works and writing. Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, this book examines Fisker's key projects - from his early railway stations and innovative housing projects to the Danish Academy in Rome - and analyses his work as a historian and writer. Fisker's output is closely associated with the functional tradition, a hybridization of international modernism and regional architectural typologies, and this book shows how his architectural poetics can be understood as an amalgamation of an ideal order with the contingent conditions of landscapes and urban sites. Hybridization is not only a valuable notion for understanding Fisker, the book argues, it can also be applied to an understanding of modernist architecture as a whole, with its various expressions, agendas and tensions both regionally and internationally.

Investigating the central role that theories of the visual arts and creativity played in the development of fascism in France, Mark Antliff examines the aesthetic dimension of fascist myth-making within the history of the avant-garde. Between 1909 and 1939, a surprising array of modernists were implicated in this project, including such well-known figures as the symbolist painter Maurice Denis, the architects Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret, the sculptors Charles Despiau and Aristide Maillol, the "New Vision" photographer Germaine Krull, and the fauve Maurice Vlaminck.Antliff considers three French fascists: Georges Valois, Philippe Lamour, and Thierry Maulnier, demonstrating how they appropriated the avant-garde aesthetics of cubism, futurism, surrealism, and the so-called Retour a l'Ordre ("Return to Order"), and, in one instance, even defined the "dynamism" of fascist ideology in terms of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage. For these fascists, modern art was the mythic harbinger of a regenerative revolution that would overthrow existing governmental institutions, inaugurate an anticapitalist new order, and awaken the creative and artistic potential of the fascist "new man." In formulating the nexus of fascist ideology, aesthetics, and violence, Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier drew primarily on the writings of the French political theorist Georges Sorel, whose concept of revolutionary myth proved central to fascist theories of cultural and national regeneration in France. Antliff analyzes the impact of Sorel's theory of myth on Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier. Valois created the first fascist movement in France; Lamour, a follower of Valois, established the short-lived Parti Fasciste Revolutionnaire in 1928 before founding two fascist-oriented journals; Maulnier forged a theory of fascism under the auspices of the journals Combat and Insurge.

Now available in a new accessible format - the definitive monograph on one of the most revered artists of our time

Ellsworth Kelly will forever be remembered as one of the most distinctive and influential artists of our time. This book, the last created in close collaboration with the artist, maps his prolific and diverse oeuvre from the 1940s to his final projects before his death in late 2015. Featuring a newly designed cover, this hardback edition brings Tricia Paik's critically acclaimed volume to a new audience of readers.

Constructed space is defined by its shape, by the materials with which it is enclosed and by the objects that are placed within or decorate its exterior or interior. The interaction of these crafted objects or decorated surfaces with space provides viewers or inhabitants with visual clues about the environment as well as visual cues about decorum: viewers can know what kind of behaviour is expected and what the space means. Furnishings and dress, textile panels and clay pots, stained glass and gesso panels, all defined as craft or decorative art, give architectural space, defined as high art, its character: without craft, architecture is empty and devoid of meaning. This engaging collection of essays presents the first sustained exploration of the relationship of craft to architectural spaces. The book unravels the complex ways in which craft controls, manipulates, organises and defines space, to highlight how the relationship between craft and space can be understood as a form of communication between related parts that combine to form a unified whole.

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.

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.

This edited volume examines the history of abstract art across Latin America after 1945. This form of art grew in popularity across the Americas in the postwar period, often serving to affirm a sense of being modern and the right of Latin America to assume the leading role Europe had played before World War II. Latin American artists practiced gestural and geometric abstraction, though the history of art has favored the latter. Recent scholarship, for instance, has focused on geometric abstraction from Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. The book aims to expand the map and consider this phenomenon as it developed in neglected regions such as Central America and the Andes, investigatinghow this style came to stand in for Latin American contemporary art.

In the era of the Anthropocene, artists and scientists are facing a new paradigm in their attempts to represent nature. Seven chapters, which focus on art from 1780 to the present that engages with Nordic landscapes, argue that a number of artists in this period work in the intersection between art, science, and media technologies to examine the human impact on these landscapes and question the blurred boundaries between nature and the human. Canadian artists such as Lawren Harris and Geronimo Inutiq are considered alongside artists from Scandinavia and Iceland such as J.C. Dahl, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Toril Johannessen, and Bjoerk.

With contributions from provocative art and architectural historians, this book is a unique exposition of the temporary architecture erected for festivals and the role it has played in developing Western architectural and urban theory. Festival Architecture is arranged in historical periods - from Antiquity to the modern era - and divided between analyses of specific festivals, set in relation to contemporary architecture and urban design ideas and theories. Illustrated with a wealth of unusual and rarely-seen images from the European festival tradition, this is a fascinating outline of the history of festival architecture ideal for postgraduate architecture and urban design students.

From Plato's dismissal of food as a distraction from thought to Kant's relegation of the palate to the bottom of the hierarchy of the senses, the sense of taste has consistently been devalued by Western aesthetics. Kant is often invoked as evidence that philosophers consider taste as an inferior sense because it belongs to the realm of the private and the subjective and does not seem to be required in the development of higher types of knowledge. From a gastrosophical perspective, however, what Kant perceives as a limitation becomes a new field of enquiry that investigates the dialectics of diet and discourse, self and matter, inside and outside. The essays in this book examine the importance of food as a pivotal element - both materially and conceptually - in the history of the Western avant-garde. From Gertrude Stein to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett, from F.T. Marinetti to Andy Warhol, from Marcel Duchamp to Eleanor Antin, the examples chosen explore the conjunction of art and foodstuff in ways that interrogate contemporary notions of the body, language and subjectivity.

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 focuses on the ephemeral architecture built for festivals and shows how these constructions played a role in the development of Western architectural and urban theory. Festival architecture has allowed architects to experiment with new ideas, new forms and new spatial arrangements.
The book is arranged in historical periods from Antiquity to the modern era. The analyses of specific festivals are set in relation to contemporary ideas and theories in architecture and urban design and essays focus on either architecture or urban design. The wealth of illustrations depict many unusual and rarely seen images from European festival tradition. The contributors are well-known architectural historians and art historians.