Part of the 'Phaidon Focus' series, this it the perfect introduction to the life and art of Joseph Beuys.

After the demise of German Idealism, Neo-Kantianism flourished as the defining philosophical movement of Continental Europe from the 1860s until the Weimar Republic. This collection of new essays by distinguished scholars offers a fresh examination of the many and enduring contributions that Neo-Kantianism has made to a diverse range of philosophical subjects. The essays discuss classical figures and themes, including the Marburg and Southwestern Schools, Cohen, Cassirer, Rickert, and Natorp's psychology. In addition they examine lesser-known topics, including the Neo-Kantian influence on theory of law, Husserlian phenomenology, Simmel's study of Rembrandt, Cassirer's philosophy of science, Cohen's philosophy of religion in relation to Rawls and Habermas, and Rickert's theory of number. This rich exploration of a major philosophical movement will interest scholars and upper-level students of Kant, twentieth-century philosophy, continental philosophy, sociology, and psychology.

Norman Rockwell gave us a picture of America that was familiar - astonishingly so - and at the same time unique, because only he could bring it to life with such authority. Rockwell best expressed this vision of America in his justly famous cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, painted between 1916 and 1963. All of his Post covers are reproduced in splendid full colour in this oversized volume, with commentaries by Christopher Finch, the noted writer on art and popular culture.

In this book, Gregory Salter traces how artists represented home and masculinities in the period of social and personal reconstruction after the Second World War in Britain. Salter considers home as an unstable entity at this historical moment, imbued with the optimism and hopes of post-war recovery while continuing to resonate with the memories and traumas of wartime. Artists examined in the book include John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Francis Newton Souza and Victor Pasmore. Case studies featured range from the nuclear family and the body, to the nation. Combined, they present an argument that art enables an understanding of post-war reconstruction as a temporally unstable, long-term phenomenon which placed conceptions of home and masculinity at the heart of its aims. Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain sheds new light on how the fluid concepts of society, nation, masculinity and home interacted and influenced each other at this critical period in history and will be of interest to anyone studying art history, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural and heritage studies.

A groundbreaking study of a remarkable artist, described by the New York Times as 'a figure ahead of her time'. The significance of Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970) as one of the most important figures in the history of Scandinavian art has only recently been recognized internationally. Beloved and renowned for her original contributions to modernist tapestry, Ryggen made radical political statements against Fascism and Nazism before and during the Second World War. Using primary sources, Ryggen expert Marit Paasche brings us a much fuller knowledge of the artist, weaving her life and work into a story that illuminates not only the artist herself, but also 20th-century art history in general. Hannah Ryggen's visually spellbinding tapestries, made on a homemade handloom in her small farm on the remote Norwegian coast, depict a wealth of subjects: Mussolini's Abyssinian campaign, her husband's internment in a Nazi camp in occupied Norway, the post-war growth of nuclear power, and media coverage of the Vietnam War. At once hard-hitting and humorous, her works combine personal candour, social and political engagement and visual majesty. Paasche explores both the artist's bold subject matter and particular balance of abstraction and figuration within the context of her life and beliefs. Including a comprehensive selection of works, this book provides an enthralling account of a remarkable, and unjustly overlooked, artist.

Admired for his trompe l'oeil style, American painter William Harnett (1848-1892) was as intellectually ambitious as he was technically skilled. The first scholarly monograph on the artist, William Harnett's Curious Objects details Harnett's career-long effort to position still life as a serious art. Nika Elder elevates the significance of Harnett's academic training and questions his apparent turn away from it. Reading his still lifes in relation to wartime visual culture, literary realism, museum display, and industrial design, she shows how Harnett experimented with inanimate objects and pictorial techniques to represent the human condition without depicting the human body. His paintings illustrate late nineteenth-century American material culture, but they also represent Reconstruction, interiority, death and life, and the imagination. By engaging such lofty themes, Harnett reimagined history painting for the modern era. His work thus locates Gilded Age art and culture in the long shadow of the Civil War and its politics.

Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850-1950 portrays the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos taken in the most varied of contexts, both private and public. Taken when male partnerships were often illegal, the photos here were found at flea markets, in shoe boxes, family archives, old suitcases, and later online and at auctions. The collection now includes photos from all over the world: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Greece, Latvia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Serbia. The subjects were identified as couples by that unmistakable look in the eyes of two people in love - impossible to manufacture or hide. They were also recognised by body language - evidence as subtle as one hand barely grazing another - and by inscriptions, often coded. Included here are ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, glass negatives, tin types, cabinet cards, photo postcards, photo strips, photomatics, and snapshots - over 100 years of social history and the development of photography. Loving will be produced to the highest standards in illustrated book publishing, The photographs - many fragile from age or handling - have been digitised using a technology derived from that used on surveillance satellites and available in only five places around the world. Paper and other materials are among the best available. And Loving will be manufactured at one of the world's elite printers. Loving, the book, will be up to the measure of its message in every way. In these delight-filled pages, couples in love tell their own story for the first time at a time when joy and hope - indeed human connectivity - are crucial lifelines to our better selves. Universal in reach and overwhelming in impact, Loving speaks to our spirit and resilience, our capacity for bliss, and our longing for the shared truths of love.

Eric Gill (1882-1940) is one of the twentieth century's most controversial artists. This illustrated introduction focuses on the clarity of Gill's drawn and cut line. It explores his genius as a letter cutter, wood engraver, sculptor and typographer in the light of his refined finished drawings and preparatory sketches. Like all modernists of the early twentieth-century, he used stylised form, explicit sexuality and the influence of other cultures to position himself at the forefront of the avant-garde. An outsider and a radical, Gill nevertheless became one the establishment's favourite artists, with his patrons including the Catholic Church, the Lord Chancellor's office, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Mint, the London Underground, the BBC, the Post Office and the League of Nations. The authors illuminate here the quality, complexities and contradictions of Gill's fascinating life and art.

Otto Dix fought in the First World War for the better part of four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. Marked by the experience, he made monumental, difficult and powerful works about it. Whereas Dix has often been presented as a lone voice of reason and opposition in Germany between the wars, this book locates his work squarely in the mainstream of Weimar society. Informed by recent studies of collective remembrance, of camaraderie, and of the popular, working-class socialist groups that commemorated the war, this book takes Dix's very public, monumental works out of the isolation of the artist's studio and returns them to a context of public memorials, mass media depictions, and the communal search for meaning in the war. The author argues that Dix sought to establish a community of veterans through depictions of the war experience that used the soldier's humorous, grotesque language of the trenches and that deliberately excluded women and other non-combatants. His depictions were preoccupied with heteronormativity in the context of intimate touch and tenderness between soldiers at the front and with sexual potency in the face of debilitating wounds suffered by others in the war.

An in-depth and nuanced look at the complex relationship between two dynamic fields of study.

While today we are experiencing a revival of world art and the so-called global turn of art history, encounters between art historians and anthropologists remain rare. Even after a century and a half of interactions between these epistemologies, a skeptical distance prevails with respect to the disciplinary other. This volume is a timely exploration of the roots of this complex dialogue, as it emerged worldwide in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, between 1870 and 1970.

Exploring case studies from Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, and the United States, this volume addresses connections and rejections between art historians and anthropologists—often in the contested arena of “primitive art.” It examines the roles of a range of figures, including the art historian–anthropologist Aby Warburg, the modernist artist Tarsila do Amaral, the curator-impresario Leo Frobenius, and museum directors such as Alfred Barr and René d’Harnoncourt. Entering the current debates on decolonizing the past, this collection of essays prompts reflection on future relations between these two fields.

Francesco Radino (Bagno a Ripoli, Florence, 1947) is one of the masters of contemporary Italian photography. Participating in the developments of research photography on the contemporary landscape, over the course of fifty years he developed an intimate way of exploring reality in its profound economic, historical, social and cultural transformations. The volume contains the most significant works of his rich production, accompanied by numerous critical interventions and writings by Radino himself. Contributions by: Roberta Valtorta, Giovanni Arpino, Giovanna Calvenzi, Paolo Cognetti, Eleonora Fiorani, Antonella Pelizzari, Urs Stahel, Fabrizio Trisoglio, Mauro Zanchi, Francesco Radino. Text in English and Italian.

This book examines the domains of public space and the private, domestic realm and the interstices between them by focusing on ways that women enter the public arena while using the domestic politics of the private one to propel them forward in their cause for social justice, equality, and citizenship. The subject is unique not only in its focus on the visual culture of first-wave feminists in Edwardian England with a comparator analysis, where appropriate, on feminist developments in France, but also in its attention to women's movements into the public arena in the late 20th/21st century more globally in the context of how they continue to honor this first-wave suffrage history. Women's bodies were and are at the center of every debate on women's rights worldwide. The present study connects the hard work of women activists in the streets of London, Paris and beyond in making their desires known.

'I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art' Lynn Barber, Sunday Times Now Grayson Perry is a fully paid-up member of the art establishment, he wants to show that any of us can appreciate art (after all, there is a reason he's called this book Playing to the Gallery and not 'Sucking up to an Academic Elite'). Based on his hugely popular BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures and full of pictures, this funny, personal journey through the art world answers the basic questions that might occur to us in an art gallery but seem too embarrassing to ask.

The significant influence of the periodical Signature on fine art has long been overlooked. While few people nowadays will have read it, no journal has greater claim to have stimulated the taste that became British neo-romanticism in the mid-20th century. Oliver Simon, its editor, publisher, patron and printer was something of an enigma. Although shy, he somehow knew 'everyone' in the London literary and arts scene during the 1930s and 40s. So outwardly conservative to be dubbed 'the archbishop' by Ben Nicholson, Oliver elicited adventurous art from his artist contributors to Signature. The Signature artists were fellow travellers on a journey: young artists working in commercial art to pay the bills. Having mastered graphic techniques for applied purposes they then began to apply what they learned to their own artwork. Then they went off to War... Those interested in the work of Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden, and Barnett Freedman will enjoy the story of the influence and fellowship of Oliver Simon, Signature, and the Curwen Press, on their art.

Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is far more than just the creator of the iconic fur teacup. In the course of her career she produced a complex, wide-ranging, and enigmatic body of work that has no parallel in modern art. Like an x-ray beam, this book scans Oppenheim’s artistic oeuvre, bringing its variety, playfulness, and poetry to the fore. Instead of simply answering the riddles posed by these intriguing works, it maps out the paths that will lead us to still more clues. Simon Baur is a leading expert in the life and art of Meret Oppenheim. The nine new essays featured in this volume are at once scholarly and easy to read. In them, Baur shares the many fascinating insights and interpretations that he has gleaned from his decades-long engagement with Oppenheim’s work. The result is an anthology that combines both biographical and thematic aspects and takes us on an exciting journey into the poetic cosmos of a truly great female artist.

This beautiful book features 100 carefully chosen images from the graphic arts, each representing a colour palette for every year of the 20th century. The images are taken from a variety of sources including magazines, book covers, adverts, posters, illustrations and postcards. A perfect source of inspiration for any professionals in the creative arts, the palettes taken from the images are displayed in a number of ratios, demonstrating the different effects achieved when altering the dominant colour. Ten palettes per decade gives an authentic overview of the colours and trends of an era, making this an ideal historical reference for anyone working in set or interior design, graphic design, illustrations or fashion. Not just a collection of pretty palettes, but a fascinating compendium of 20th-century imagery and artistic styles, this book aims to please the eye on more than one level.

This book offers a general historical overview of the Dada movement and presents the individual destinies of some of its major players against the background of the historical, political, and cultural trends which dominated the twentieth century in Europe as well as in America. The author discusses in depth the reciprocal interaction between Dada as an avant-garde movement and its environment, as well as a number of the emerging phenomena born during this interactive process. Dada is viewed as a complex phenomenon dominated by the emergence of hard-to-extrapolate effects; one hundred years of history enable us to ascertain the depth and the extent of this extremely significant socio-cultural event which was Dada and its relevancy to our post-modern and in the future-perhaps-post-human societies.

This book examines the photography's unique capacity to represent time with a degree of elasticity and abstraction. Part object-study, part cultural/philosophical history, it examines the medium's ability to capture and sometimes "defy" time, while also traveling as objects across time-and-space nexuses. The book features studies of understudied, widespread, practices: studio portraiture, motion studies, panoramas, racing photo finishes, composite college class pictures, planetary photography, digital montages, and extended-exposure images. A closer look at these images and their unique cultural/historical contexts reveals photography to be a unique medium for expressing changing perceptions of time, and the anxiety its passage provokes.