Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is arguably Japan's most famous living artist. Her originality, innovation and powerful desire to communicate have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades. During this time, Kusama has explored painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance and installation, as well as product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition she has recently achieved. Now in her eightieth year, she continues to make art, extending the range of her large-scale, dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-painting extensive series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings. Kusama has exhibited widely around the world, including representing Japan at the Venice Biennale, and her work is in many major collections. Accompanying the first major retrospective exhibition of the artist's work to be staged in the UK, this lavishly illustrated book features an introductory essay by Tate curator Frances Morris as well as four other substantial essays by leading international critics. Topics covered include Kusama's time in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and an exploration of her art from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Robert Smithson and the American Landscape is a social history of the artist's earthworks and their critical reception. Providing a close analysis of Smithson's own writings and art works, Ron Graziani demonstrates how his earthworks were part of an aesthetic and civic fault line that ruptured in the 1960s. Smithson's humanized environments were a powerful indictment of modernist sense of art and nature. Moreover, Graziani shows how Smithson's earthworks formed part of what was called the 'new conservationism' in the late 1960s and how they gave material form to the contradictions of a sociological issue that was inseparable from its economic legacy.

Why has jewellery and body adornment often been marginalized in studies of modernist art and design? This study explores the relationship between jewellery, modernism and modernity from the 'jazz age' to the second world war in order to challenge the view that these portable art forms have only a minor role to play in histories of modernism. From the masterworks of the Parisian jewellery houses to the film and photography of Man Ray, this study seeks to present jewellery in a new light, where issues of representation and display are considered to be as important in the creation of a modern 'jewellery culture' as the objects themselves. Drawing on material from museums, archives, contemporary journals, memoirs, literary and theoretical texts, this study shows how the emergence of modern jewellery began to seriously question conventional notions of body adornment.

In this classic survey, now updated and with full-colour images throughout, Edward Lucie-Smith introduces the art of Latin America from 1900 to the present day. He discusses in detail major figures such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as well as dozens of less well-known artists. Those who spent their lives in exile, and artists from Europe and the US who lived in South America, such as Leonora Carrington, are all included in this broad, comprehensive view. The artists featured here have sought for indigenous roots and a local tradition; explored abstraction, expressionism and new media (video, installation, performance); entered dialogue with European and North American movements, while insisting on reaching a wide popular audience for their work; and created an energetic, innovative and very varied art scene across the continent today. A new chapter extends the discussion into the twenty-first century, summarizing key trends and most notable figures of the last two decades. A constant theme is the embrace of the experimental and the new by artists across Latin America.

Towards Tate Modern provides a new interdisciplinary account of Tate's shifting position as a national arts institution. The book examines how earlier government directives impacted on Tate, which saw the organisation refocusing its aims and resulted in it pioneering new models for working across the public and private sectors. The decade prior to the opening of Tate Modern witnessed a changing political, economic, cultural and social landscape. As London was rebuilding its own vision, Tate re-configured its role as a public museum and gallery by engaging with the market. Tate re-imagined what a public museum and gallery can do, what it can look like and where it can be and, in doing so, responded to a new kind of audience with a larger appetite than before. Re-cast as a cultural and social forum, Tate Modern turned itself into a popular public event. This research considers how Tate Modern generated a set of new debates and what this might mean for the future role of the public museum and gallery. Towards Tate Modern will be of particular interest to academics and students, art practitioners and policy makers working in the fields of museum studies, policy studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and political and economic history, as well as those involved in archival research. It will also engage those wishing to widen their understanding of how an institution such as Tate Modern was created.

Looking behind the scenes at the personalities and policies of such venerable institutions as the Federal Arts Project and the Museum of Modern Art, A. Joan Saab discerns a broad-based democratic modernism inspired by and engaged with the social life of the period.In the summer of 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Arts Project under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. The project's goal was, in the words of its director Holger Cahill, to "get people all over the United States interested in art as an everyday part of living and working." In addition to this endeavor, the project would also provide work for artists who, as a project press release stated, "had been hit just as hard by unemployment as any other producing worker." Meanwhile, as director of the newly opened Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr was instituting his philosophy of "democracy in design" through a series of ambitious exhibits that focused on informed consumption in the marketplace.The idea of treating the artist as a "producing worker" and art as an "everyday part of living and working" was a novel one in 1935 and illustrated a broad shift in the social roles of both. Prior to the 1930s, art in America had resided principally in the domain of the cultural elite. The upheaval of the Depression era, however, challenged this authority. Throughout the decade, government officials, museum professionals, educators, and artists worked together to determine not only what role artists would play in society but also what forms democratic art would take and how widely it would be disseminated, thus fundamentally redefining the relationship between art and society. This egalitarian artistic movement of the 1930s stands as a significant moment in the ongoing dialogue over the relationship of art and public life that continues today.

This text provides a fascinating study of Michael Morgan's aspirations, his influences and the challenges he has faced on his extraordinary journey.

In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists--including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace--to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.

Vera Dika explores the reuse of images, plots and genres of film history from a broad range of critical perspectives. Examining works of art and film that resist the pull of the past, Dika provides an in-depth analysis within a variety of media, including performance, photography, Punk film, and examples from mainstream American and European cinema. Her study analyzes avant-garde art work within the context of contemporary mainstream film practice, as well as in relationship to their historical moment.

Vera Dika explores the reuse of images, plots and genres of film history from a broad range of critical perspectives. Examining works of art and film that resist the pull of the past, Dika provides an in-depth analysis within a variety of media, including performance, photography, Punk film, and examples from mainstream American and European cinema. Her study analyzes avant-garde art work within the context of contemporary mainstream film practice, as well as in relationship to their historical moment.

The conflict between National Socialism and Ernst Barlach, one of the important sculptors of the twentieth century, is an unusual episode in the history of Hitler's efforts to rid Germany of 'international modernism.' Barlach did not passively accept the destruction of his sculptures, but protested the injustice, and continued his work. Peter Paret's discussion of Barlach's art and struggle over creative freedom, is joined to an analysis of Barlach's opponents. Hitler's rejection of modernism, often dismissed as absurd ranting, is instead interpreted as a internally consistent and politically effective critique of liberal Western culture. That some radical national socialists nevertheless advocated a 'nordic modernism' and tried to win Barlach over, indicates the cultural cross-currents running through the early years of the Third Reich. Paret's closely focused study of an artist in a time of crisis seamlessly combines the history of modern Germany and the history of modern art. Peter Paret is Mellon Professor in the Humanities Emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Spruance Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, which awarded him the Thomas Jefferson Medal and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The German government has awarded him the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit. His other works include, German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945 (Cambridge, 2001), Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (Univ, of NC, 1997), The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Harvard, 1989), and Clausewitz and the State (Oxford, 1985).

The 607 paintings and one sculpture documented in Volume 4 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne were produced during a period of less than three years, from late 1974 through early 1977. In September 1974, Warhol changed studios, moving across Union Square from the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West to the third floor of 860 West Broadway. Like Volumes 2 and 3, Volume 4 is identified with a new studio, where Warhol continued to work for a decade, until he moved into his last studio at 22 East 33rd Street on December 3, 1984. Volume 4 may be seen as the first in a series of books associated with one studio that will document an enormously productive ten-year period in Warhol's oeuvre from the mid seventies to the mid eighties.

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

Can looking at disaster and mass death destroy us? Forgetting Lotas Wife provides a theory and a fragmentary history of destructive spectatorship in the twentieth century. Its subject is the notion that the sight of historical catastrophe can destroy the spectator. The fragments of this history all lead back to the story of Lotas wife: looking back at the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, she turns into a pillar of salt. This biblical story of punishment and transformation, a nexus of sexuality, sight, and cities, becomes the template for the modern fear that looking back at disaster might petrify the spectator. Although rarely articulated directly, this idea remains powerful in our culture. This book traces some of its aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical consequences. Harries traces the figure of Lotas wife across media. In extended engagements with examples from twentieth-century theater, film, and painting, he focuses on the theatrical theory of Antonin Artaud, a series of American films, and paintings by Anselm Kiefer. These examples all return to the story of Lotas wife as a way to think about modern predicaments of the spectator. On the one hand, the sometimes veiled figure of Lotas wife allows these artists to picture the desire to destroy the spectator; on the other, she stands as a sign of the potential danger to the spectator. These works, that is, enact critiques of the very desire that inspires them.The book closes with an extended meditation on September 11, criticizing the notion that we should have been destroyed by witnessing the events of that day.

Postwar Italian Art History Today brings fresh critical consideration to the parameters and impact of Italian art and visual culture studies of the past several decades. Taking its cue from the thirty-year anniversary of curator Germano Celant's landmark exhibition at PS1 in New York - The Knot - this volume presents innovative case studies and emphasizes new methodologies deployed in the study of postwar Italian art as a means to evaluate the current state of the field. Included are fifteen essays that each examine, from a different viewpoint, the issues, concerns, and questions driving postwar Italian art history. The editors and contributors call for a systematic reconsideration of the artistic origins of postwar Italian art, the terminology that is used to describe the work produced, and key personalities and institutions that promoted and supported the development and marketing of this art in Italy and abroad.

This sophisticated artist's book, with custom-cut cover and partially exposed binding, documents John Bock's 2006 action, "Maltreated Frigate"--the height as well as the culmination of this rising German artist's performative work. Here, Bock's vision comes to life in a multitude of color illustrations composed and collaged by the artist. The libretto, printed in its entirety, explodes in linguistic fireworks and tumbles down the printed page, solid in its earthiness and ready to be constructed into a jumble of bizarre and whimsical neologisms--vivid testimony to the artist's zest for expression. "Maltreated Frigate" was performed as a spectacle in 10 scenes, a collision course of rock opera, Theater of the Absurd, animated sculpture and puppet show. This raucous volume invites the reader to accompany the artist and his protagonists along their tour-de-force, stream-of-consciousness action. It is a violent ride on a machine from hell, steered by an idiosyncratic inner logic.

French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art Before, During, and After Vichy examines the close link between art and politics in France from 1935 to 1970. In essays on the exhibition and criticism of modern art, Michèle Cone provides a broader context for the xenophobia that characterizes Vichy-era France. Cone argues that the decline of French art in the second half of the century was caused, not by the invasion of foreign artists, but by the Parisian art establishment itself, which continued to promote the Vichy-era values of national identity and national tradition.

In German Encounters with Modernism, Peter Paret traces the reception of modern art, from the 1840s through the Nazi era, through the lens of social and political developments in Germany. Addressing broad cultural topics, such as the early history of Expressionism, the role of anti-Semitism in German reactions to modernism, and the impact of World War I on the arts, he also includes new interpretations of the work of artists such as the sculptor Ernst Barlach. Based on new archival discoveries, this study combines a strong narrative approach with interdisciplinary analysis.

In German Encounters with Modernism, Peter Paret traces the reception of modern art, from the 1840s through the Nazi era, through the lens of social and political developments in Germany. Addressing broad cultural topics, such as the early history of Expressionism, the role of anti-Semitism in German reactions to modernism, and the impact of World War I on the arts, he also includes new interpretations of the work of artists such as the sculptor Ernst Barlach. Based on new archival discoveries, this study combines a strong narrative approach with interdisciplinary analysis.

Jane Goldman offers a revisionary, feminist reading of Woolf's work. Focusing on Woolf's engagement with the artistic theories of her time, Goldman analyzes Woolf's fascination with the Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1920 and the solar eclipse of 1927 by linking her response to a much wider literary and cultural context. Illustrated with color pictures, this book will appeal not only to scholars working on Woolf, but also to students of modernism, art history, and women's studies.

Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. This book engages with canonical figures--Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte--as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.

The art of Edvard Munch is striking for the originality and universality of its themes, which cross moments in place and time. Yet he was very much an artist of the nineteenth century, and the focus of this publication is to show how especially in his prints and photographs Munch was enabled by technical advances developed by his contemporaries to create an entirely new visual language. Munch is probably best known for his desire to express emotions surrounding love, illness and death. However, the authors in this volume show that this preoccupation was not only based on biographical events but reflects wider contemporary debates on developments in medicine and science, including treatment of mental illness, as well as a proliferation of technical expertise in the production of prints. The arguments presented expand on subjects touched upon in the critically acclaimed British Museum exhibition Edvard Munch: love and angst (2019). Munch's remarkable prints were fundamental to establishing his international career, but there remains much to investigate in connection with the background to his innovatory techniques, his relationship with contemporary printmakers and his experiments with photography. The authors in this volume go some way to address these themes and outline future avenues of research.

Monumental cares rethinks monument debates, site specificity and art activism in light of problems that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such as war, migration and the climate crisis. The book shows how artists address these issues, from Chicago and Berlin to Oslo, Bucharest and Hong Kong, in media ranging from marble and glass to postcards, graffiti and re-enactment. A multidirectional theory of site does justice to specific places but also to how far-away audiences see them. What emerges is a new ethics of care in public art, combined with a passionate engagement with reality harking back to the realist aesthetics of the nineteenth century. Familiar questions can be answered anew: what to do with monuments, particularly when they are the products of terror and require removal, modification or recontextualisation? And can art address the monumental concerns of our present? -- .