How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects-radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism-abstract, non-objective art-to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful. With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.

Alone of his contemporaries, J.M.W. Turner is commonly held to have prefigured modern painting, as signalled in the existence of The Turner Prize for contemporary art. Our celebration of his achievement is very different to what Victorian critics made of his art. This book shows how Turner was reinvented to become the artist we recognise today. On Turner's death in 1851 he was already known as an adventurous, even baffling, painter. But when the Court of Chancery decreed that the contents of his studio should be given to the nation, another side of his art was revealed that effected a wholescale change in his reputation. This book acts as a guide to the reactions of art writers and curators from the 1850s to the 1960s as they attempted to come to terms with his work. It documents how Turner was interpreted and how his work was displayed in Britain, in Europe and in North America, concentrating on the ways in which his artistic identity was manipulated by art writers, by curators at the Tate and by designers of exhibitions for the British Council and other bodies. -- .

Perceiving Dubuffet: Art, Embodiment, and the Viewer offers a comprehensive reconsideration of Jean Dubuffet's work which contextualizes it within contemporary developments in phenomenology and examines the central role played by questions relating to embodiment in the evolution of his aesthetic thinking and artistic practice. Conceived as an interdisciplinary project and combining phenomenological approaches with detailed visual and linguistic analysis, elucidation of interpictorial and intertextual reference, and extensive archival research, the study examines the development across Dubuffet's work of a core set of cognate themes and formal concerns, charts his many and various shifts in priority and direction, and identifies the constants that drive his tireless experimentation with materials, genre, dimensionality, viewer involvement, visual-verbal interplay, and metareference. Topics explored include: the affinities between Merleau-Ponty's account of the phenomenological reduction and Dubuffet's conception of the functioning of the artwork; Dubuffet's thematisation of the experience of embodiment; the foregrounding of temporality and the exploration of corporeal and associative memory; the testing and transgression of generic boundaries; the experimentation with unconventional materials and with dimensionality; the impact of Dubuffet's reading of scientific theory and of Daoist and Buddhist philosophy on his understanding of man's relationship with his environment; and the central role given to the viewer's physical interaction with the artwork. Perceiving Dubuffet: Art, Embodiment, and the Viewer covers Dubuffet's lengthy career and examines the full range of his pictorial and sculptural oeuvre and the large corpus of aesthetic writings produced between the 1940s and the 1980s.

Naamiwan's Drum follows the story of a famous Ojibwe medicine man, his gifted grandson, and remarkable water drum. This drum, and forty other artefacts, were given away by a Canadian museum to an American Anishinaabe group that had no family or community connections to the collection. Many years passed before the drum was returned to the family and only of the artefacts were ever returned to the museum. Maureen Matthews takes us through this astonishing set of events from multiple perspectives, exploring community and museum viewpoints, visiting the ceremonial group leader in Wisconsin, and finally looking back from the point of view of the drum. The book contains a powerful Anishinaabe interpretive perspective on repatriation and on anthropology itself. Containing fourteen beautiful colour illustrations, Naamiwan's Drum is a compelling account of repatriation as well as a cautionary tale for museum professionals.

LASA Visual Culture Studies Section Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Winner, Arthur P. Whitaker Prize, Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, 2019 In the 1930s, the artistic and cultural patronage of celebrated Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas transformed a small Michoacán city, Pátzcuaro, into a popular center for national tourism. Cárdenas commissioned public monuments and archeological excavations; supported new schools, libraries, and a public theater; developed tourism sites and infrastructure, including the Museo de Artes e Industrias Populares; and hired artists to paint murals celebrating regional history, traditions, and culture. The creation of Pátzcuaro was formative for Mexico; not only did it provide an early model for regional economic and cultural development, but it also helped establish some of Mexico’s most enduring national myths, rituals, and institutions. In Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico, Jennifer Jolly argues that Pátzcuaro became a microcosm of cultural power during the 1930s and that we find the foundations of modern Mexico in its creation. Her extensive historical and archival research reveals how Cárdenas and the artists and intellectuals who worked with him used cultural patronage as a guise for radical modernization in the region. Jolly demonstrates that the Pátzcuaro project helped define a new modern body politic for Mexico, in which the population was asked to emulate Cárdenas by touring the country and seeing and embracing its land, history, and people. Ultimately, by offering Mexicans a means to identify and engage with power and privilege, the creation of Pátzcuaro placed art and tourism at the center of Mexico’s postrevolutionary nation building project.

This volume celebrates the scholarly and curatorial vision of Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003). As Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y. Varnedoe was one of the most distinguished curators in the United States, and as Professor of Fine Arts at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, a famously dynamic teacher. The nineteen essays, written by Varnedoe's most distinguished doctoral students (now noted art historians in their own right), highlight the wide range of subjects in 19th- and 20th-century art introduced in his pedagogy. Several derive from the collaboration of their authors with Dr. Varnedoe on major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere and offer new insight into these projects. The volume includes introductory essays by the editors and by Varnedoe's colleagues Robert Storr and Robert Rosenblum as well as a full bibliography of Varnedoe's writings.

This book tells the story of how and why millions of Chinese works of art got exported to collectors and institutions in the West, in particular to the United States. As China's last dynasty was weakening and collapsing from 1860 into the early years of the twentieth century, China's internal chaos allowed imperial and private Chinese collections to be scattered, looted and sold. A remarkable and varied group of Westerners entered the country, had their eyes opened to centuries of Chinese creativity and gathered up paintings, bronzes and ceramics, as well as sculptures, jades and bronzes. The migration to America and Europe of China's art is one of the greatest outflows of a culture's artistic heritage in human history. A good deal of the art procured by collectors and dealers, some famous and others little known but all remarkable in individual ways, eventually wound up in American and European museums. Today some of the art still in private hands is returning to China via international auctions and aggressive purchases by Chinese millionaires.

Donald Judd Interviews presents more than sixty interviews with the artist over the course of four decades, and is the first compilation of its kind. It is the companion volume to the critically acclaimed and bestselling Donald Judd Writings. This collection of interviews engages a diverse range of topics, from philosophy and politics to Judd's insightful critiques of his own work and the work of others such as Mark di Suvero, Edward Hopper, Yayoi Kusama, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. The opening discussion of the volume between Judd, Dan Flavin, and Frank Stella provides the foundation for many of the succeeding conversations, focusing on the nature and material conditions of the new art developing in the 1960s. The publication also gathers a substantial body of unpublished material across a range of mediums including extensive interviews with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Barbara Rose. Judd's contributions in interviews, panels, and extemporaneous conversations are marked by his forthright manner and rigorous thinking, whether in dialogue with art critics, art historians, or his contemporaries. In one of the last interviews, he was asked, "What kind of advice do you have for young artists and architects based on all the things you thought all these years?" Judd responded, "To remember that art and architecture are both real activities with their own integrity and that they are not basically commercial activities and you have to partly live with that. Certainly, it's not hard to maintain the difference ... I think both activities, to repeat myself, have an integrity. They are each a particular activity, and if you don't like that activity, don't do it. Go do something else. If you really want to make a lot of money, go sell cars or something." Donald Judd Interviews is co-published by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. The interviews expand upon the artist's thinking present in Donald Judd Writings (Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).

Charlie James (1867-1937) was a premier carver and painter from the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nation of British Columbia. Also known by his ceremonial name Yakuglas, he was hawker a prolific artist and activist during a period of severe oppression for First Nations people in Canada. Yakuglas' Legacy examines the life of Charlie James. During the early part of his career James created works primarily for ritual use within Kwakwaka'wakw society. However, in the 1920s, his art found a broader audience as he produced more miniatures and paintings. Through a balanced reading of the historical period and James' artistic production, Ronald W. Hawker argues that James' shift to contemporary art forms allowed the artist to make a critical statement about the vitality of Kwakwaka'wakw culture. Yakuglas' Legacy, aided by the inclusion of 123 colour illustrations, is at once a beautiful and poignant book about the impact of the Canadian project on Aboriginal people and their artistic response.

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas. Among these, The Gulf Stream (1899), often considered the most consequential painting of his career, reveals Homer's lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. Recognizing the artist's keen ability to distill complex issues, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer's work resonates with the challenges of the present day. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (April 11-July 31, 2022) National Gallery, London (September 10, 2022-January 8, 2023)

The notion of a person--or even an object--having a "double" has been explored in the visual arts for ages, and in myriad ways: portraying the body and its soul, a woman gazing at her reflection in a pool, or a man overwhelmed by his own shadow. In this edited collection focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century western art, scholars analyze doppelgangers, alter egos, mirror images, double portraits and other pairings, human and otherwise, appearing in a large variety of artistic media. Artists whose works are discussed at length include Richard Dadd, Salvador Dali, Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, the creators of Superman, and Nicola Costantino, among many others.

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.

This volume lists more than 4,800 European and 400 Australian, South African, and Japanese artists who worked from 1800 to 1990, and offers 9,000 signature examples. Five special categories in the back of this volume help to identify signatures that are difficult to read. In the front of this volume is a listing of 69 sources of information, which can also lead the researcher to more than 100 additional sources transcribed into key letters.

This volume of edited essays is the first one in English to offer a critical overview of the specific features of Belgian modernity from 1880 to 1940 in a multiplicity of disciplines: literature and poetry, politics, music, photography and drama. The first half of the book investigates the roots of twentieth century modernity in Belgian fin de sicle across a variety of genres (novel, poetry and drama), not only within but also beyond the boundaries of Symbolism. The contributors go on to examine the explosion of Belgian culture on the international scene with the rise of the avant-gardes, notably Surrealism: and the contribution made in minor genres, such as the popular novels of Simenon and Jean Ray, and the Tintin comics of Herg.

This first major retrospective of Amalia Mesa-Bains unearths her significant contributions to Chicanx/Latinx art and feminism. Best known for her pioneering altar installations, Amalia Mesa-Bains is one of the most innovative feminist and Latinx artists of her generation. In her forty-year career as an artist, activist, educator, and scholar, she has explored the experiences, spiritual practices, and histories of Mexican American women and addressed the colonial erasure and recovery of Mexican, African American, and Indigenous Californians. Appropriately called an "archaeological" practice, Mesa-Bains's art creates sacred spaces imbued with cultural memory, leading viewers on a magical journey of discovery through what might otherwise be lost to existing canons of history. Amalia Mesa-Bains: The Archaeology of Memory is the exhibition catalog accompanying the first major retrospective of her work, bringing her installations from the 1970s to the present together for the first time. Featuring an essay by the artist and an interview with her, the book also brings together top-tier scholars who explore the ecofeminism, migrant histories, spirituality, and politics of erasure that ground her interdisciplinary practice. As a whole, the book cements Mesa-Bains's place as a trailblazing artist within the history of art. Published in association with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Exhibition dates: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. February 4-July 23, 2023

Vertigo seeks to document the surge of multimedia art driven by the advent of new technologies, including works produced by great names in art such as Balla, Warhol, Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Nam June Paik, and Laurie Anderson.

In the 2022 Dung Beetle Calendar, Elia has brought together 'The Best Of' the 'Dung Beetle New Words Reading Scheme'. Twelve of her favourite and most popular pages from Dung Beetle Books (2014-2020) have been handpicked and are showcased through the months of the year 2022, with handy spaces to record your plans. Time passes all the time. We at Dung Beetle Books want to help you to keep track of it, and so have devised this entirely original 'calendar book', which details all of the days and months in the year 2022 - each accompanied by a specially selected image from our ancient archives - so that you may count them as they pass, and insert notes of any apparently vital plans of your own. We at Dung Beetle Books believe that life is only manageable with reference to a divinely or scientifically ordained central authority, and so require that you forward any such plans to your relevant representative of tyrannical rule, before committing them to the pages of this calendar. We also wish you all the best in your constant, pointless struggle with the inevitable chaos of everything, and hope this product proves a useful tool in pretending that it isn't. Ezra Elia (Head of Mental Manure Development) & Miriam Elia (Director of Defecation) Features 'the best of' works from the Dung Beetle Reading Scheme 1a We go to the gallery, 1b We learn at home, 1c We go out, 1d We do Christmas & 2a We do Lockdown. All images by Miriam Elia, writing Miriam Elia & Ezra Elia. Graphic Design by Becky Philp.

Wilhelm Worringer s landmark study in the interpretation of modern art, first published in 1908, has seldom been out of print. Its profound impact not only on art historians and theorists but also for generations of creative writers and intellectuals is almost unprecedented. Starting from the notion that beauty derives from our sense of being able to identify with an object, Worringer argues that representational art produces satisfaction from our objectified delight in the self, reflecting a confidence in the world as it is as in Renaissance art. By contrast, the urge to abstraction, as exemplified by Egyptian, Byzantine, primitive, or modern expressionist art, articulates a totally different response to the world: it expresses man s insecurity. Thus in historical periods of anxiety and uncertainty, man seeks to abstract objects from their unpredictable state and transform them into absolute, transcendental forms. Abstraction and Empathy also has a sociological dimension, in that the urge to create fixed, abstract, and geometric forms is a response to the modern experience of industrialization and the sense that individual identity is threatened by a hostile mass society. Hilton Kramer s introduction considers the influence of Worringer s thesis and places his book in historical context.

Revealing an alternative story of modern Scottish art, A New Era examines the most experimental work of Scottish artists during the first half of the 20th century. It challenges the accepted view of the dominance of the Scottish Colourists and uncovers the hitherto little-known progressive Scottish art world. Through these works, we can see the commitment of Scottish artists to the progress of art through their engagement and interpretation of the great movements of European modern art, from Fauvism and Expressionism, to Cubism, Art Deco, abstraction and Surrealism, among others. Looking at the most advanced work of high-profile artists such as William Gillies and Stanley Cursiter, and lesser-known talents, like Tom Pow and Edwin G. Lucas, A New Era takes its name from the group established in Edinburgh in 1939 to show surreal and abstract work by its members.

This study compares text/image interaction as manifested in emblem books (and related forms) and the modern bande dessinee, or French-language comic strip. It moves beyond the issue of defining the emblematic genre to examine the ways in which emblems - and their modern counterparts - interact with the surrounding culture, and what they disclose about that culture. Drawing largely on primary material from the Bibliotheque nationale de France and from Glasgow University Library's Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem literature, Laurence Grove builds on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and, more recently, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. Divided into four sections-Theoretics, Production, Thematics and Reception-Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture broaches topics such as theoretical approaches (past and present) to text/image forms, the question of narrative within the scope of text/image creations, and the reuse of visual iconography for diametrically opposed political or religious purposes. The author argues that, despite the gap in time between the advent of emblems and that of comic strips, the two forms are analogous, in that both are the products of a 'parallel mentality'. The mindsets of the periods that popularised these forms have certain common features related to repeated social conditions rather than to the pure evolution over time. Grove's analysis and historical contextualisation of that mentality provide insight into our own popular culture forms, not only the comic strip but also other hybrid media such as advertising and the Internet. His juxtaposition of emblems and the bande dessinee increases our understanding of all such combinations of picture and text.

The essays collected here investigate art made by women in South Africa between 1910, the year of Union, and 1994, the year of the first democratic election. During this period, complex political circumstances and the impact of modernism in South Africa affected the production of images and objects. The essays explore the ways in which the socio-political circumstances associated with twentieth-century modernity had a paradoxical impact on women. If some were empowered, others were disadvantaged: while some were able to further their social and cultural development and expression, the advancement of others was impeded. The contributors study the lives and achievements of women - named and un-named, black and white, and from different cultural groups and social contexts - and consider objects and images that are historically associated with both 'art' and 'craft'. In all the essays, gender theory is related to South African circumstances. The volume explores gender theory in relation to twentieth-century visual culture and discusses economic conditions and regional geographies as well as notions of identity. It investigates the influence of educational and cultural institutions, the role of theory on art practice, debates about material culture, the power of nationalist ideologies and the role of feminist theories in a changing country. A wide range of visual images and objects provide the touchstone for debate and analysis - paintings, sculptures, photography, baskets, tapestries, embroideries and ceramics - so that the book is richly visual and celebrates the diversity of South African art made by women.

Enzo Mari was an inventor of languages, a constructor of grammars - intended as methods or sets of rules -, deeming these instruments necessary to “communicate knowledge with improved quality and efficiency�.It is impossible to define his discipline or his profession: he is an artist, an industrial designer, a graphic designer, an architect, but also a theorist, a pedagogue, an intellectual, possibly a philosopher, certainly a utopian who knew how to programme quiet revolutions which are, even today, often misunderstood when not totally unknown; these are some of the many facets of a complex and revolutionary personality. The root of his design methodology, which characterises the process of all the studies he later conducted, originates in his initial research into the field of visual arts, i.e. the research into the perceptual ambiguity of three-dimensional space that he undertook in the early 1950s, when he was still a scenography student at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. What characterises Mari’s design process is a “scientific� method made up of codes, theorems, theses, the construction of tools and instruments, tests, the comparison of models and the transcription of results deriving from his observations. This volume intend to return to the public a mnemonic atlas, a mapping system that can be used to explore and understand the complex nuances of the research conducted by Mari. Semantic research and verifications that have resulted in the programming of art, and which constitute the basis of the method that defines a process common to all the research, disciplines and utopias he pursued. Text in English and Italian.

Modern Art: A Critical Introduction traces the historical and contemporary contexts for understanding modern art movements, and the theories which influenced and attempted to explain them. This approach forgoes the chronological march of art movements and isms in favour of looking at the ways in which art has been understood. It investigates the main developments in art interpretation from the same period, from Kant to post-structuralism, and draws examples from a wide range of art genres including painting, sculpture, photography, installation and performance art. The book includes detailed discussions of visual art practices both inside and outside the museum. This new edition has been restructured to make the key themes as accessible as possible and updated to include many more recent examples of art practice . An expanded glossary and margin notes also provide definitions of the range of terms used within theoretical discussion and critical reference. Individual chapters explore key themes of the modern era, such as the relationship between artists and galleries, the politics of representation, the changing nature of self-expression, the public monument, nature and the urban,