The name which predominates in the development of art throughout the twentieth century, and to which many of the revolutionary changes are ascribed, is that of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Not only was he one of the most influential artists, he was also one of the most versatile. This beautifully produced book surveys the whole range of his paintings, from the haunting works of the Blue Period, to the brute power of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the lyrical sweetness of his family portraits, the revolutionary developments of Cubism and the later manifold experimentations with form and colour. Roland Penrose's introductory essay on Picasso was first published in 1971, when the great master was still alive. Penrose was acclaimed in his own right as a painter, and his long friendship with Picasso gave him unique insight into his life and work. David Lomas has written a preface introducing us to the friendship between these two artists. He has also written notes to each full-page colour plate, discussing the picture in detail, making this a perfect introduction to the twentieth century's most famous artist.

In an age of high tech, our experience of technology has changed tremendously, yet the definition of technology has remained largely unquestioned. High Techne redresses this gap in thinking about technology, examining the shifting relations of technology, art, and culture from the beginnings of modernity to contemporary technocultures.

Drawing on the Greek root of technology (techne, generally translated as "art, skill, or craft"), R. L. Rutsky challenges both the modernist notion of technology as an instrument or tool and the conventional idea of a noninstrumental aesthetics. Today, technology and aesthetics have again begun to come together: even basketball shoes are said to exhibit a "high-tech style" and the most advanced technology is called "state of the art." Rutsky charts the history and vicissitudes of this new high-tech techne up to our day -- from Fritz Lang to Octavia Butler, Thomas Edison to Japanese Anime, constructivism to cyberspace.

Progressing from the major art movements of modernism to contemporary science fiction and cultural theory, Rutsky provides clear and compelling evidence of a shift in the cultural conceptions of technology and art and demonstrates the centrality of technology to modernism and postmodernism.

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.

A thought-provoking volume on Edvard Munch’s often neglected pictures of nature, exploring the Norwegian artist’s landscapes, seascapes, and existential environments in light of his own time and ours This richly illustrated catalogue provides a multifaceted perspective on the pictures of nature and landscape by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This important topic has been neglected in scholarship on Munch, despite the fact that it is a major motif in his oeuvre. This volume is the first to explore the theme in its full breadth throughout Munch’s corpus, including his paintings, lithographs, watercolors, and woodcuts. His depictions of forests, farmland, and the seashore, as well as paintings of sea storms, snow, and other extreme weather, present us with undulating forms that animate nature. They likewise provide an example of Munch’s preference for liminal spaces where transformations take place, often celebrating human interaction with nature in its many manifestations. The book also considers Munch’s less conventional landscapes, and particularly those where his famous Scream motif occurs. These environments depict nature in an existential way, suggesting that the artist held a deep concern for nature’s destruction by humans—a concern no less relevant today. A complementary look at his writings as primary sources alongside his images shows how Munch mixed a scientific perspective on nature with metaphysical and spiritual notions of rebirth that permeate other parts of his corpus. The book also includes a engaging short story by award-winning author Ali Smith that was inspired by Munch's work. Distributed for MUNCH  Exhibition Schedule: Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (June 10–October 15, 2023) Museum Barberini, Potsdam (November 18, 2023–April 1, 2024) Munch Museum, Oslo (April 27–August 24, 2024)

South African artist Irma Stern (1894–1966) is one of the nation’s most enigmatic modern figures. Stern held conservative political positions on race even as her subjects openly challenged racism and later the apartheid regime. Using paintings, archival research, and new interviews, this book explores how Stern became South Africa’s most prolific painter of Black, Jewish, and Colored (mixed-race) life while maintaining controversial positions on race. Through her art, Stern played a crucial role in both the development of modernism in South Africa and in defining modernism as a global movement. Spanning the Boer War to Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and into the contemporary #RhodesMustFall movement, Irma Stern’s work documents important 20th-century cultural and political moments. More than 50 years after her death, Stern’s legacy challenges assumptions about race, gender roles, and religious identity and how they are represented in art history.

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.

Elijah Pierce (1892-1984) was born the youngest son of a former slave on a Mississippi farm. He began carving at an early age when his father gave him his first pocketknife. Pierce became known for his wood carvings nationally and then internationally for the first time in the 1970s. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, this publication seeks to revisit the art of Elijah Pierce and see it in its own right, not simply as 'naive'. Elijah Pierce made his living as a barber; he was also a qualified preacher. Just as his barber shop was a place for gossip and meeting, so his art reflects his own and his community's concerns, but also universal themes. Through his carvings Pierce told his own life story and chronicled the African-American experience. His subjects ranged from politics to religious stories but he seldom distinguished the race of his figures - he thought of them as everyman. His secular carvings show his love of baseball, boxing, comics and the movies, and also reflect his appreciation for American heroes who fought for justice and liberty. In 1932, Pierce completed 'the Book of Wood', which he considered his best work. Originally carved as individual scenes, the completed 'Book' tells the story of Jesus carved in bas-relief. He and his wife Cornelia held "sacred art demonstrations" to explain the meaning of the Book of Wood. Pierce's work was first appreciated in the art world thanks to a fellow sculptor, Boris Gruenwald, who saw the expressive power of his work. As a later critic wrote, "There are 500 woodcarvers working today in the United States who are technically as proficient as Pierce, but none can equal the power of Pierce's personal vision". Pierce became known primarily in circles promoting 'naive' art, winning first prize at the International Meeting of Naive Art in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1973. The vast majority of his work is now held in Columbus, Ohio, which had become his home town. This book revisits Pierce's art seeking to see it in its own right, and not simply as 'naive'. Another critic wrote: "He reduces what he wants to say to the simplest forms and compositions. They are decorative, direct, bold and amusing. He uses glitter and all kinds of devices to make his message clear. It gives his work an immediacy that's very appealing" - an appeal arising from a sophisticated art with its own particular voice.

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.

How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture In the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston. Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a substantial, accessible and revealing analysis of his work. With more than 850 images, the book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions. Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.

This extensively illustrated book examines Greenaway's vision from a number of perspectives and traces a shift of sensibility in his work. David Pascoe examines not only Greenaway's films, but also his paintings, exhibitions and installations.
"[Pascoe] tirelessly explicates the numerology and mytho-mania that are the film-maker's organising principles"--"The Guardian"
"A supremely intelligent, utterly tuned-in, definitive exploration of the ultimate British auteur's back catalogue, helpfully illustrated at every opportunity. . . illuminating"--"Empire"

On the 150th anniversary of the painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the Musee Matisse in Cateau-Cambresis, which was founded by the artist in his hometown in 1952, pays tribute to the lesser-known man of the North, who became one of the greatest masters of the 20th century. You thought you knew everything about Matisse's work? This exhibition reveals the mystery of the first 20 years of his career and the awakening of a genius moving from shadow to light. It honours his early works from the revelation of painting, and his academic training until the end of his academic studies in Paris, where he taught until 1911. This decisive and defining period of his identity helps us to understand how he grew into a painter on his Hauts-de-France lands. It dissects the creative process of the man copying the ancients, drawing inspiration from the greatest masters of the past and his contemporaries, to shake the codes with 'luxury, calm and voluptuousness' and impose himself on the rank of those he has contemplated. Text in English and French.

"Mainframe Experimentalism" challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley's technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and emerging scholars from several disciplines, "Mainframe Experimentalism" demonstrates that the radical and experimental aesthetics and political and cultural engagements of early digital art stand as precursors for the mobility among technological platforms, artistic forms, and social sites that has become commonplace today.

This is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of the entire career of British artist Richard Eurich (1903-1992), a figurative painter of compelling power and often visionary intensity who brought rare imaginative reserves to his depiction of the world around him, as well as to his apprehension of the mysterious and unseen. Eurich was a private man, not much given to self-promotion, and as such has not received the widespread attention he deserves. The Art of Richard Eurich locates the artist within the context of 20th-century British art, demonstrating his relevance in all quarters of the art world of the period. Eurich was draughtsman, landscape painter, teacher, War Artist, autobiographer, marine painter extraordinaire, portrait painter, figure painter, satirist, genre painter, visual poet of the beach, and occasional sculptor. His many creative talents are brought together in a compelling analysis of how these various parts refer to each other and to the man who was responsible for them. Featuring a wide selection of his artworks, from the topographical to the visionary, from the drawn to the painted, this book unspools the narrative of Eurich's life through expertly chosen examples of his paintings and drawings and places him in relation to his fellow-artists, friends and contemporaries.

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.

Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum In Race ExpertsLinda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in the Races of Mankind series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protege of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Mestrovic, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. Nonetheless, the Field Museum commissioned her to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman's Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and lay ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate into her artistic model of race not only racial science but also popular ideas that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the Races of Mankind exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them. Race Experts is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.

Inspired by the Charles Darwin bicentennial, The Art of Evolution presents a collection of essays by international scholars renowned for their groundbreaking work on Darwin. The book not only includes a discussion of the popular imagery that immediately followed the publication of On the Origin of Species, but it also traces the impact of Darwin's ideas on visual culture over time and throughout the Western world. The contributors analyze the visual expression of a broad range of Darwin-inspired subjects, including eugenics, aesthetics and sexual selection, monera and protoplasm theories, social Darwinism and colonialism, the Taylorized body, and the natural history of surrealism. The visual imagery responding to Darwin and Darwinism ranges from popular caricature to state propaganda to major trends within Modern Art and Modernism. This rarely addressed subject will enrich our understanding of Darwin's impact across disciplines and reveal how transformations in science were manifested visually in so many enticingly unexpected ways. Contributors: Sara Barnes, Robert Michael Brain, Fae Brauer, Janet Browne, James Krasner, Barbara Larson, Marsha Morton, Gavin Parkinson, Andrew Patrizio, Phillip Prodger, Pat Simpson

"To me life and art are one and the same, for the key lies in one's knowledge of people and life. In art one is trying to express it in the simplest imaginative way, as in the art of past civilizations, for beauty and truth are the only two things which live timeless and ageless." - Mine Okubo This is the first book-length critical examination of the life and work of Mine Okubo (1912-2001), a pioneering Nisei artist, writer, and social activist who repeatedly defied conventional role expectations for women and for Japanese Americans over her seventy-year career. Okubo's landmark Citizen 13660 (first published in 1946) is the first and arguably best-known autobiographical narrative of the wartime Japanese American relocation and confinement experience. Born in Riverside, California, Okubo was incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II, first at the Tanforan Assembly Center in California and later at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. There she taught art and directed the production of a literary and art magazine. While in camp, Okubo documented her confinement experience by making hundreds of paintings and pen-and-ink sketches. These provided the material for Citizen 13660. Word of her talent spread to Fortune magazine, which hired her as an illustrator. Under the magazine's auspices, she was able to leave the camp and relocate to New York City, where she pursued her art over the next half century. This lovely and inviting book, lavishly illustrated with both color and halftone images, many of which have never before been reproduced, introduces readers to Okubo's oeuvre through a selection of her paintings, drawings, illustrations, and writings from different periods of her life. In addition, it contains tributes and essays on Okubo's career and legacy by specialists in the fields of art history, education, women's studies, literature, American political history, and ethnic studies, essays that illuminate the importance of her contributions to American arts and letters. Mine Okubo expands the sparse critical literature on Asian American women, as well as that on the Asian American experience in the eastern United States. It also serves as an excellent companion to Citizen 13660, providing critical tools and background to place Okubo's work in its historical and literary contexts.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.