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 Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities includes illustrations of many previously unpublished paintings, including a number from private collections, as well as surveying his other artistic activities. The text draws on many letters and other documents, again previously unpublished, and is the most comprehensive account of Ravilious' career ever published.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.

Shaping the Surface explores the history of modern British architecture through the lens of surface, materiality and decoration. Picking up on a trait that art historian Nikolaus Pevsner first identified as a 'national mania for beautiful surface quality', this book makes a new contribution to architectural history and visual culture in its detailed examination of the surfaces of British architecture from the middle of the 19th century up to the turn of the 21st century. Tracing this continuing sensibility to surface all the way through to the modern era, it explores how and why surface and materiality have featured so heavily in recent architectural tradition, examining the history of British architecture through a selection of key cultural moments and movements from Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts, to Brutalism, High-Tech, Post-Modernism, Neo-Vernacular, and the New Materiality. Embedded within the narrative is the question of whether such national characters can exist in architecture at all - and indeed the extent to which it is possible to identify a British architectural consciousness in an architectural tradition characterised by its continuous importation of theories, ideas, materials and people from around the globe. Shaping the Surface provides a deep critique and meditation on the importance of surface and materiality for architects, designers, and historians everywhere - in Britain and beyond - while it also serves as a thematic introduction to modern British architectural history, with in-depth readings of the works of many key British architects, artists, and critics from Ruskin and William Morris to Alison and Peter Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Rogers and Caruso St John.

American artist Nancy Spero (b.1929) concentrates on the depiction of women: mythological women, movie women, tortured women. Inspired by classical and modern sources, she collages and imprints her contemporary goddesses on to long, papyrus-like friezes that scroll around museum walls. Her subject matter, which has ranged from the writings of Artaud to the Vietnam War, mirrors her life. Working in Paris in the cultural ferment of the 1960s, she moved to New York in the 1970s to co-establish the feminist gallery A.I.R. and to join with artists and critics such as Leon Golub, Robert Morris and Lucy R Lippard in forming the Art Workers' Coalition. Since the 1980s she has attracted international acclaim, her exquisite works giving form to feminist issues and new critical discourses. The Survey by Jon Bird, cultural theorist and curator of the first British retrospective of Spero's work, discusses developments in her practice since the 1950s. Contemporary art scholar and critic Jo Anna Isaak talks with the artist about her life and work. Art historian Sylvere Lotringer, Edtior of Semiotext(e) and author of Overexposed, focuses on her 1993 installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In recognition of the impact Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove made on her, Spero has chosen a scene from the screenplay; key excerpts from Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity by feminist theorist Alice Jardine on the place of women in a patriarchal culture complete the Artist's Choice section. Also included are a selection of Spero's own writings, many published here for the first time.

Memory Work demonstrates the evolution of the pioneering minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt. An artist determined to make her way through a new aesthetic in the 1960s, Truitt was tireless in her pursuit of a strong cultural voice. At the heart of her practice was the key theme of memory, which enabled her not only to express personal experience but also to address how perception was changing for a contemporary viewership. She gravitated toward the idea that an object in one's focus could unleash a powerful return to the past through memory, which in turn brings a fresh, even critical, attention to the present moment. In addition to the artist's own popular published writings, which detail the unique challenges facing female artists, Memory Work draws on unpublished manuscripts, private recordings, and never-before-seen working drawings to validate Truitt's original ideas about the link between perception and mnemonic reference in contemporary art. De Baca offers an insider's view of the artist's unstinting efforts to realize her artistic vision, as well as the cultural, political, and historical resonances her oeuvre has for us today.

This book offers an informative and accessible cultural history of the European avant-garde in its early twentieth-century heyday. It provides comparative coverage of cultural experimentation across the major European languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Spanish and Italian.

Andrew Webber presents striking examples to illustrate a time of unprecedented experiment and energetic performance in all aspects of culture. Readings of some of the most important and characteristic avant-garde texts, pictures and films are set against some of the key developments of the period: advances in technology and psychology; the rise of radical politics; the cultural ferment of the modern metropolis; and the upheaval in issues of gender and sexuality. The author's mediation between a variety of cultural forms, combining political and psychoanalytical modes of understanding, evokes the richness of the age in a manner that students will find both illuminating and provocative.

This volume will be an excellent textbook for courses on the avant-garde in departments of comparative cultural studies, literature and film studies.

This definitive biography, 258 photographs of his work and catalog raisonne** of Walter Launt Palmer, a celebrated 20th century painter, presents his personal and creative life in great detail. The text covers the entire scope of Palmer's work, tracing his experiments with style from academicism to impressionism.

In 1925 the artists Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious moved to the Essex village of Great Bardfield, at first sharing lodgings. Over the course of several years and encouraged by Bawden and Ravilious' work, other artists came to live in the village, forming a community of artists and designers that has continued to the present. Among the first to join them were the Rowntrees, Kenneth and Diana, and Michael Rothenstein and his wife Duffy Ayers. They were followed by John Aldridge, painter and designer of wallpapers (printed, like Bawden's papers, by the Curwen Press); Walter Hoyle, printmaker and also a wallpaper designer; Marianne Straub, textile designer and weaver; illustrators and printmakers Bernard Cheese and his wife Sheila Robinson. Though the careers of Bawden and Ravilious are well-documented, many of the other artists are less well-known but equally talented, such as George Chapman, Stanley Clifford-Smith and Laurence Scarfe.This book tells the story of Great Bardfield and its artists, and their famous 'open house' exhibitions, showing how the village and neighbouring landscape nurtured a distinctive style of art, design and illustration from the 1930s to the 1970s and beyond. '..their shared artistic legacy is immediately obvious from this beautiful book.' --Country Life 16th 23rd December 2015'..Beautifully designed.' --Evening Standard 24th December 2015'..splendidly illustrated' -- The Spectator, 28th November 2015

An exploration of the fascinating parallels and differences between Picasso's Woman with a Book and Ingres's Madame Moitessier This publication examines, in detail, two extraordinary interrelated works: Picasso's Woman with a Book (1932) and Ingres's Madame Moitessier (1844-56). Each painting is explored in depth, illuminating the parallels and differences between the artists' techniques and creative ambitions. The first essay tells the story of the twelve-year gestation of Ingres's Madame Moitessier, focusing on the role of drawings in the elaboration of the composition, and of the sitter herself in determining how she was to be presented. The second essay traces the development of Picasso's Woman with a Book, among the most celebrated likenesses of the artist's young lover, Marie-Therese Walter. In contrast to Ingres's work, it was painted in just a day or two. The final essay explores, through these two works, the artists' shared interest in the relationship between nude and clothed bodies, revealing the depth of Picasso's engagement with Madame Moitessier, which motivates and animates Woman with a Book. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London June 3-October 9, 2022 Norton Simon Museum October 21, 2022-January 30, 2023

Go behind-the-scenes of the art world as you tour the homes and studios of 86 international artists. Some studios are large, with lovely high ceilings and oversized skylights. Some are modest, even cramped. Some are amazingly pristine and carefully ordered with drawing spaces, painting galleries, and meditation zones. Some are a study of chaos, but in all of them the artists are inspired to create. Whether working in oils or pastels, sculpture or glass, ceramics or wood, today s artists are as varied as their work, with studios that range from chicken coops and horse barns to entire islands and extra bedrooms. Through 321 color images, enjoy this glimpse into contemporary artists' lives."

The exhibition Maison Sonia. Sonia Delaunay and the Atelier Simultane is dedicated to the applied work of Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), with a focus on her textile design work. The accompanying catalogue includes the first scholarly essays on Sonia Delaunay's collaborations with silk industrialist Robert Perrier and couturier Jacques Heim, who were among her most important collaborators and previously unexplored. In addition, the publication provides the first overview of the role of Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous fabrics in the design of modern living and media spaces.

Modernist design, that radical and iconoclastic break with the past, is now itself a thing of the past. Perhaps sufficiently so that over the last few years, artists have been treating modernist designs as icons themselves, and incorporating them-sometimes literally and often conceptually-into their own work. These recombinations and modifications result in an entirely unique mix: a meta-modernism in which the original source is changed, self-referential, abstracted. Using classic elements in new configurations, artists from across the world are making original works of art that comment on the claims of the past in light of the complexities of the present. The artists included in MetaModern, most of whom were born in the 1960s, question the reverence accorded to classic modernism. Too young to have grown up eating their breakfast cereal from a Russel Wright spoon while seated in an Eames molded chair, these artists appropriate the language of the modernist movement critically, using it to interrogate the meaning of style and its relationship to history. The artists include Conrad Bakker, Constantin Boym, Kendell Carter, Jordi Colomer, William Cordova, Elmgreen & Dragset, Fernanda Fragateiro, Terence Gower, Brian Jungen, Olga Koumoundouros, Jill Magid, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Dorit Margreiter, Josiah McElheny, Edgar Orlaineta, Gabriel Sierra, Simon Starling, Clarissa Tossin, Barbara Visser, and James Welling.

Published to accompany the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this catalogue examines the impact of Futurism and Cubism on British modernist printmaking from the beginning of World War I to the beginning of World War II. Imagery ranges from powerful artistic impressions of the first fully mechanized war, to radical geometric abstractions, to the colourful, streamlined jazz age images of speed, sport and diversion which the Grosvenor School artists created in order to introduce a broader public to modern art and design. Interest in this era is peaking among collectors, curators and art historians and this is an ideal moment to introduce these innovative British printmakers to a wider public.

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

From painters and photographers to sculptors and performance artists, fifty of the most influential contemporary artists are profiled in this colorful and engaging book that traces the various artistic movements and radical changes of the second half of the twentieth century. Presented chronologically, each artist is featured in one or two double page spreads that include brilliant reproductions of their most important works, a succinct text about their work and life, an insightful biography with key dates in their career, and informative background on major developments in the art world. As diverse and inspiring as the artists themselves, this book is a voyage of discovery into art's cutting edge.

From the Mississippi west to the Pacific, from border to border north and south, here is the first thorough overview of novelists, historians, and artists of the modern American West. Examining a full century of cultural-intellectual forces at work, a leading authority on the twentieth-century West brings his formidable talents to bear in this pioneering study. Richard W. Etulain divides his book into three major sections. He begins with the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, when artists and authors were inventing an idealized frontier--especially one depicting initial contacts and conflicts with new landscapes and new peoples. The second section covers the regionalists, who focused on regional (mostly geographical) characteristics that shaped distinctively "western" traits of character and institutions. The book concludes with a discussion of the postregional West from World War II to the ?90s, a period when novelists, historians, and artists stressed ethnicity, gender, and a new environmentalism as powerful forces in the formation of modern western society and culture. Etulain casts a wide net in his new study. He discusses novelists from Jack London to John Steinbeck and on to Joan Didion. He covers historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Earl Pomeroy and Patricia Nelson Limerick, and artists from Frederic Remington and Charles Russell to Georgia O?Keeffe and R. C. Gorman. The author places emphasis on women painters and authors such as Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Judith Baca. He also stresses important works of ethnic writers including Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Amy Tan. An intriguing survey of tendencies and trends and a well-defined profile of influences and outgrowths, this book will be valuable to students and scholars of western culture and history, American studies, and related disciplines. General readers will appreciate the book's balanced structure and spirited writing style. All readers, whatever their level of interest, will discover the major cultural inventions of the American West over the past one hundred years.

In small, stunningly rendered self-portraits, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted herself cracked open, hemorrhaging during a miscarriage, anesthetized on a hospital gurney, and weeping beside her own extracted heart. Her works are so incendiary in emotion and subject matter that one art critic suggested the walls of an exhibition be covered with asbestos.

In this beautiful book, art historian Hayden Herrera brings together numerous paintings and sketches by the amazing Mexican artist, documenting each with explanatory text that probes the influences in Kahlo's life and their meaning for her work. Included among the illustrations are more than eighty full-color paintings, as well as dozens of black-and-white pictures and line illustrations. Among the famous and little-known works included in Frida Kahlo: The Paintings are The Two Fridas, Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, Without Hope, The Dream, The Little Deer, Diego and I, Henry Ford Hospital, My Birth, and My Nurse and I. Here, too, are documentary photographs of Frida Kahlo and her world that help to illuminate the various stages of her life.

Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India's Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political participations and dissociations. Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sunderason activates, instead, distinctly locational histories that refract transnational currents. She analyzes largely unknown and dispersed archives-drawings, diaries, posters, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside paintings and prints-and insists that art as archive is foundational to understanding modern art's socialist affiliations during India's long decolonization. By bringing together expanding fields of South Asian art, global modernisms, and Third World cultures, Partisan Aesthetics generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization.

An acclaimed history of Harlem’s journey from urban crisis to urban renaissance With its gleaming shopping centers and refurbished row houses, today’s Harlem bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. Brian Goldstein traces Harlem’s Second Renaissance to a surprising source: the radical social movements of the 1960s that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny. Young Harlem activists, inspired by the civil rights movement, envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African American population. In the succeeding decades, however, the community-based organizations they founded came to pursue a very different goal: a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents. The Roots of Urban Renaissance demonstrates that gentrification was not imposed on an unwitting community by unscrupulous developers or opportunistic outsiders. Rather, it grew from the neighborhood’s grassroots, producing a legacy that benefited some longtime residents and threatened others.

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

Accompanying an exhibition at BASTIAN, London, this striking publication presents works by the German-born American artist Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), produced at the end of the Second World War and immediately afterwards. Hofmann's angular abstractions (such as Fury No. 1) personify the insecurities of the period, but this was also the moment that he moved towards the soft ambiguous forms and gesture that would become the hallmark of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Renowned as both an artist and teacher, Hofmann established his first art school in Munich in 1915. Built on the contemporary ideas regarding colour and form of Cezanne, the Cubists and Kandinsky, his work laid the foundations for his reputation as a forward-thinking artist. After relocating to the United States in 1932, he then opened schools in both New York and Provincetown, immersing himself within America's growing avantgarde art scene. His teaching had a significant influence on post-War American artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell - artists who would later lead the Abstract Expressionism movement. The works presented here span from 1942 to 1946. Whilst demonstrating Hofmann's development towards abstraction, the paintings still reveal an identifiably representational quality which nod to his figurative beginnings; linear paintings such as The Virgin (1946) particularly emphasise this artistic trajectory. Primarily known for his expressive use of bold, often primary colours, the palette used in these paintings consists predominantly of vivid, bright colours and contrasting dark tones, epitomizing the conflicted post-War feeling. Hofmann's work during the 1940s also saw him garner the support of several key figures in the artistic scene, including the renowned gallerists and dealers Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, and Samuel M. Kootz. A particularly important moment in his career - aged 64 at the time - was his first solo exhibition in New York in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century, considered 'a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism' by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg.

Robert Lehman, one of the foremost art collectors of his generation, embraced both traditional and modern masters. This volume catalogues 130 nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings that are now part of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum. The majority of the works are by artists based in France, but there are also examples from the United States, Latin America, and India, reflecting Lehman's global interests.

The catalogue opens with outstanding paintings by Ingres, Theodore Rousseau, and Corot among other early nineteenth-century artists. They are joined by an exemplary selection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canvases by Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin. Twentieth-century masters include Bonnard, Matisse, Rouault, Dali, and Balthus. Newly researched modern works are represented by Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Kees van Dongen, Dietz Edzard, and D.G. Kulkarni (DIZI).

From Robert Lehman's studied and conventional taste for nineteenth-century French academic practitioners to his intuitive eye for emerging young artists of his own time, all are documented and discussed here. Some three hundred comparative illustrations supplement the catalogue entries, as do extensively researched provenance information, exhibition histories, and references. The volume also includes a bibliography and indexes."