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.

A revelatory glimpse into the passions and obsessions of 60 visionary artists through the medium of their personal sketchbooks, treatises, storybooks, grimoires, and journals. This unprecedented gathering of handmade books from the most notable Art Brut artists has been brought together expressly for this publication from both public and private collections. Each volume is showcased in separate chapters featuring the cover and a selection of inside pages, with accompanying commentary. They cover the period from the early 20th century to the present, and include works by Horst Ademeit, Alöise, Giovanni Bosco, James Castle, Henry Darger, Charles Dellschau, Malcolm MacKesson, Dan Miller, Michel Nedjar, Jean Perdrizet, Royal Robertson, Charles Steffen, Oskar Voll, August Walla, and Adolf Wölfli, among others. Text in English and French.

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,

The only book available on Scottish painting, this book is now in its third edition with a new introduction and final chapter that brings the book up to date with the latest developments in Scottish painting (Richard Wright's win of the Turner Prize 2009). Illustrated throughout, the work is by acknowledged authority on Scottish painting William Hardie. Scottish society has been reflected through the strong colour and energetic brushwork of its artists. The book traces the beginnings of Scottish painting from the foundation of the Foulis Academy in 1753, with William Dyce and Scott Lauder establishing themselves in the south, followed by W Q Orchardson and John Pettie around 1860. European travel ensured Scottish painters were open to new techniques, and the explosion of the Glasgow Boys and then the Colourists onto the scene meant Scotland was respected for its innovation and imagination. Charles Rennie Mackintosh today is still internationally recognised for his work, and the painting of John Byrne, Curister, and Peter Howson bring the book to the present day.

Design History Beyond the Canon subverts hierarchies of taste which have dominated traditional narratives of design history. This book explores a diverse selection of objects, spaces and media, ranging from high design to mass-produced and mass-marketed objects, as well as counter-cultural and sub-cultural material. The authors' research highlights the often marginalized role of gender and racial identity in the production and consumption of design, the politics which underpins design practice and the role of designed objects as pathways of nostalgia and cultural memory. While focused primarily on North American examples from the early 20th century onwards, this collection also features essays examining European and Soviet design history, as well as the influence of Asia and Africa on Western design practice. This book is organised in three thematic sections: 'Consumers', 'Intermediaries' and 'Designers'. The first section analyses a range of designed objects and spaces through the experiences and perspectives of users. The second section considers intermediaries from both technology and cultural industries, as well as the hidden labour within the design process itself. The final section focuses on designers from multiple design disciplines including high fashion, industrial design, interior design, graphic design and design history pedagogy. The essays utilize different research methods and a wide range of theoretical approaches, including feminist theory, critical race theory, spatial theory, material culture studies, science and technology studies and art history. This book brings together the most recent research which stretches beyond the traditional canon and looks to interdisciplinary methodologies to better understand the practice and consumption of design.

Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) is now firmly one of the most popular artists of his period. Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities includes illustrations of many previously unpublished paintings, including a number from private collections, as well as surveying his other artistic activities. The text draws on many letters and other documents, again previously unpublished, and is the most comprehensive account of Ravilious' career ever published. It also attempts to position the artist in relation to the English art of his time, and more recent critical and cultural issues.

The first in-depth study of a monumental wall hanging—rediscovered after many years—by renowned Bauhaus artist Anni Albers. Albers was influential in elevating textiles from craft to fine art. Her exquisite wall hanging Camino Real—seen for the first time outside of Mexico City at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, and the subject of this book—is a superb example of this modern master’s work. In 1967, noted architects Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragán commissioned Albers to create a work for the newly built Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. Completed in 1968, her striking wall hanging Camino Real is heavily influenced by Latin American art and culture. Showcasing Albers’s approach to working with textiles as a “many-sided practice,� it is accompanied in this book by works Albers made following her move to the United States in 1933, including innovative wall hangings, weavings, and a range of works on paper. Together, these works reflect Albers’s brilliant embrace of different materials and techniques and her ability to work at varied scales. The works in this publication offer additional context and motifs, demonstrating the artist’s pioneering investment in textiles as an art form and her parallel interest in mass-produced designs. Published on the occasion of the Anni Albers exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, this catalogue features new scholarship from the show’s curator, Brenda Danilowitz, art historian and chief curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and T’ai Smith, an expert on Bauhaus craft and weaving.

Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of widows within society, Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe is the first book to consider the distinct and important relationship between ritual and representation. The fifteen new interdisciplinary essays assembled here read widowhood as a catalyst for the production of a significant body of visual material-representations of, for and by widows, whether through traditional media, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, or through the so-called 'minor arts,' including popular print culture, medals, religious and secular furnishings and ornament, costume and gift objects, in early modern Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Arranged thematically, this unique collection allows the reader to recognize and appreciate the complexity and contradiction, iconicity and mutability, and timelessness and timeliness of widowhood and representation.

*One of The Times Best Art Books of the Year* 'Looking to Sea is a remarkable and compelling book... I loved it.' Edmund de Waal 'In her first, transporting book, Lily Le Brun sweeps the beaches of the past century of British art, collecting treasures from sea, shingle and shore... A book to pack in your picnic basket for shivering dips, heatwave day trips and ice-cream Sundays' The Times An alternative history of modern Britain, Looking to Sea is an exquisite work of cultural, artistic and philosophical storytelling. Looking to Sea considers ten pivotal artworks, from Vanessa Bell's Studland Beach, one of the first modernist paintings in Britain, to Paul Nash's work bearing the scars of his experience in the trenches and Martin Parr's photographs of seaside resorts in the 1980s, which raised controversial questions of class. Each of the startlingly different pieces, created between 1912 and 2015, opens a window onto big ideas, from modernism and the sublime, the impact of the world wars and colonialism, to issues crucial to our world today like the environment and nationhood. In this astonishingly perceptive portrait of the twentieth century, art critic Lily Le Brun brings a fresh eye to a vast idea, offering readers an imaginative new way of seeing our island nation. 'Le Brun's writing is at once bold and delicate, far-reaching and fine-tuned. Her book explores the inexhaustible variety of human perception.' Alexandra Harris 'A smart and clear-eyed set of meditations on marine gaze, made with a painterly touch worthy of the chosen artists. Empathy and intelligence lift memoir into cultural history.' Iain Sinclair

Marie Laurencin, in spite of the noticeable reputation she made in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, has attracted only sporadic attention by late-twentieth century art historians. Until now the substance of her art and the feminist issues that were entangled in her life have been narrowly examined or reduced by an author's chosen theoretical format; and the terms of her lesbian identity have been overlooked. In this case study of une femme inadaptee and an unfit feminist, Elizabeth Kahn re-situates Laurencin in the on-going feminist debates that enrich the disciplines of art history, women's studies and literary criticism. Kahn's thorough reading of the artist's visual and literary production ensures a comprehensive overview which addresses notable works and passages but also integrates those that are less well known. Incorporating feminist theory and building on the work of contemporary feminist art historians, she avoids the heroics of conventional biography, instead allowing her subject to participate in the historical collective of women's work. Provocative and engagingly written, this fresh new study of Marie Laurencin's life and works also explores the multiple valences by which to connect the histories of, and find new connections between, women artists across the twentieth century.

The working women of Victorian and Edwardian Britain were fascinating but difficult subjects for artists, photographers, and illustrators. The cultural meanings of labour sat uncomfortably with conventional ideologies of femininity, and working women unsettled the boundaries between gender and class, selfhood and otherness. From paintings of servants in middle-class households, to exhibits of flower-makers on display for a shilling, the visual culture of women's labour offered a complex web of interior fantasy and exterior reality. The picture would become more challenging still when working women themselves began to use visual spectacle. In this first in-depth exploration of the representation of British working women, Kristina Huneault explores the rich meanings of female employment during a period of labour unrest, demands for women's enfranchisement, and mounting calls for social justice. In the course of her study she questions the investments of desire and the claims to power that reside in visual artifacts, drawing significant conclusions about the relationship between art and identity.

Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant 'archives' that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material - from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films - and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical "history of the oppressed" as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.

This is the fascinating autobiography of a society heiress who became the bohemian doyenne of the art world. Written in her own words it is the frank and outspoken story of her life and loves: her stormy relationships with such men as Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock, and her discovery of new artists. Known as 'the mistress of modern art', Peggy Guggenheim was a passionate collector and major patron. She amassed one of the most important collections of early twentieth-century European and American art embracing Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism. A must-read for anyone with an interest in these major-league artists, this seminal period of art history, and the ultimate self-invented woman. Includes a foreword by Gore Vidal.

A celebration of a unique culture and its experience of design, Responding to Chaos offers a timely examination of Japanese design at the start of a new century. The country's economic boom of the 1980s produced a surge of interest in land and building, and consequently in design in all its forms. From restaurant interiors to products, from private housing to recreational spaces, design received an unprecedented degree of attention. However the bursting in the early 1990s of this so-called 'bubble' economy has prompted a re-examination of design and its role in urban society.

A groundbreaking insight into Gustave Courbet and his bold experiments in landscape painting Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cezanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet's paintings of rural French life. Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet's work and later developments in French modernism. Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet's native Franche-Comte to the beaches of Normandy, Paul Galvez follows the artist on his travels as he uses a palette-knife to transform the Romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world. The Courbet he discovers is not the celebrated history painter of provincial life, but a committed landscapist whose view of nature aligns him with contemporary developments in geology, history, linguistics, and literature.

The unexpected encounter of a rubber glove, a green ball and the head from the classical statue of the Apollo Belvedere gives rise to one of the most compelling paintings in the history of modernist art: Giorgio de Chirico's "The Song of Love" (1914). De Chirico made his career in Paris in the years before World War I, combining his nostalgia for ancient Mediterranean culture with his fascination for the curios found in Parisian shop windows. Beloved by the Surrealists, this uncanny image exemplifies de Chirico's radical "metaphysical" painting, which creates a disturbing sense of unreality, outside logical space and time, through the novel depiction of ordinary things. Emily Braun's essay explores the sources behind the work's enigmatic motifs, its influence on avant-garde painters and poets, and its continuing ability to captivate viewers as de Chirico intended, even a century after it was made.

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.

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yves-Alain Bois, and Theirry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollack, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

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

At the outset of his career, Norman Rockwell was not the most likely candidate for long-term celebrity; he was just one of many skilful illustrators working within the conventions of the day. But there was something tenacious about his vision, and something uncanny about his access to the wellsprings of public taste. Although technically he was an academic painter, he had the eye of a photographer and, as he became a mature artist, he used this eye to give us a picture of America that was familiar - astonishingly so - and at the same time unique. It seems familiar because it was everyone's dream of America; and it was unique because only Rockwell managed to bring it to life with such authority. This was, perhaps, an America that never existed, but it was an America the public wanted to exist. And Rockwell put it together from elements that were there for everyone to see. Rockwell helped preserve American myths, but, more than that, he recreated them and made them palatable for new generations. His function was to reassure people, to remind them of old values in times of rapid change.

A reassessment of self-taught artist William Edmondson, exploring the enduring relevance of his work This richly illustrated volume reintroduces readers to American sculptor William Edmondson (1874–1951) more than 80 years after his historic solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Edmondson began carving at the onset of the Depression in Tennessee. Initially creating tombstones for his community, over time he expanded his practice to include biblical subjects, the natural world, and recognizable figures including nurses and preachers. This book features new essays that explore Edmondson’s life in the South and his reception on the East Coast in the 1930s. Reading the artist through lenses of African American experience, the authors draw parallels between then and now, highlighting the complex relationship between Black cultural production and the American museum. Countering existing narratives that have viewed Edmondson as a passive actor in an unfolding drama—a self-taught sculptor “discovered� by White patrons and institutions—this book considers how the artist’s identity and position within history influenced his life and work. Distributed for the Barnes Foundation  Exhibition Schedule: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (June 25–September 10, 2023)  

This innovative volume provides an illuminating guide to painting, photography, sculpture, pottery, printmaking and performance art by some of the most celebrated Native American and Canadian First Nation artists of our time. The book brings together distinguished scholars, critics, curators and Native artists, including Lucy R. Lippard, Gerald R. McMaster and Kay Walking Stick to explore the multiple meanings of Native American art.
The contributors argue for Native American art's place in modern art history, but also trace Native artists' continuing resistance to dominant orthodoxies of the art market and art history. The artist contributors, who represent several Native nations, including Cherokee, Lakota and Plains Cree, emphasize the importance of traditional stories, myths and ceremonies in contemporary art, and show how their art is linked to struggles over land, sovereignty and self-determination.

Painter and illustrator Edward Bawden's five scrapbooks, assembled over a period of more than 55 years, contain everything from stamps, photographs, cigarette cards, Christmas cards and letters to newspaper cuttings, drawings and autographs, amongst other fascinating ephemera. Beautifully designed and illustrated with over 250 images taken from these books, Edward Bawden Scrapbooks reveals this wonderful and at times eccentric collection and provides a new insight into one of the most popular artists of 20th-century Britain. The pages illustrated provide an alternative window into Bawden's world, showing his very conscious awareness of both Surrealism and the work of other contemporary designers and typographers. But it is not only aficionados of Bawden who will be beguiled by these scrapbooks: perusing them is like trawling through an almanac of art, design and literature of the inter- and post-war years and the work of other key artists of the era such as Ben Nicholson, David Jones, Evelyn Dunbar, Eric Ravilious and Hugh Casson also appears. Some pages are beautiful, some instructive and others simply baffling but when taken in conjunction with Bawden's watercolours, prints, illustrations, murals and other designs, the scrapbooks are the closest thing we have to an autobiography of one of the 20th-century's most reclusive and English of artists.