The first major publication on the art of the New Guinea Highlands, this extraordinary volume is destined to become the definitive resource on this little-known region. The Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco consists of thousands of objects and represents hundreds of clans and villages throughout New Guinea. The first book in a projected ten-volume series, this lavishly illustrated volume focuses on the Highlands-a region of rugged mountains, fertile valleys, and a civilization that dates back more than forty thousand years. Here, in more than six hundred pages of rich color, are beautifully crafted masks, shields, headdresses, and ceremonial and personal objects, the majority of which have never before been published or exhibited. Archival and reference photographs, maps of key locations, and authoritative essays by more than a dozen preeminent scholars covering a wide range of subjects, from prehistoric agriculture to body art, make this book a collector's dream.

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.

Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In this text, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by mid-century, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary. Drucker suggests a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists, based on a re-reading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara.

A rich exploration of the possibilities of representation after Modernism, Mark Taylor's new study charts the logic and continuity of Mark Tansey's painting by considering the philosophical ideas behind Tansey's art. Taylor examines how Tansey uses structuralist and poststructuralist thought as well as catastrophe, chaos, and complexity theory to create paintings that please the eye while provoking the mind. Taylor's clear accounts of thinkers ranging from Plato, Kant, and Hegel to Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and de Man will be an invaluable contribution to students and teachers of art.

In 1957-58, after he moved to New York's Lower East Side, Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) began making collages he has described as "mostly done in an uncontrolled and intuitive dream mode." Made from found, printed imagery, the "Strange Egg"s are enigmatic, surrealistic, and vastly different from the Pop art of the 1960s for which he soon became famous.

These collages are characterized by self-contained forms, or "eggs," the artist made by melding cut fragments of photographic illustrations. While many of the pieces are unrecognizable, some original references are discernible: a piece of pie, the hind leg of a horse, the creased skin of a clenched fist, and the texture of concrete. These eighteen collages were first shown at the Menil Collection in 2012, and they are being published together for the first time, along with poems that the artist wrote at the same time based on found imagery from his walks around New York's Lower East Side. Anticipating second-generation New York School art-poetry collaborations by half a decade, "Strange Eggs" makes an important single-artist contribution to our understanding of the period.

<div>One of the most important sculptors of this century, Richard Serra has been a spokesman on the nature and status of art in our day. Best known for site-specific works in steel, Serra has much to say about the relation of sculpture to place, whether urban, natural, or architectural, and about the nature of art itself, whether political, decorative, or personal. In interviews with writers including Douglas and Davis Sylvester, he discusses specific installations and offers insights into his approach to the problem each presents. Interviews by Peter Eisenman and Alan Colquhoun elicit Serra's thoughts on the relation of architecture to contemporary sculpture, a primary component in his own work. From essays like "Extended Notes from Sight Point Road" to Serra's extended commentary on the <i>Tilted Arc</i> fiasco, the pieces in this volume comprise a document of one artist's engagement with the practical, philosophical, and political problems of art.</div>

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.

An exceptionally thoughtful and well-written biography of one of the most influential studio potters in Britain Widely recognized as the father of studio pottery, Bernard Leach (1887-1979) played a pioneering role in creating an identity for artist potters in Britain and around the world. Born in the East (Hong Kong) and educated in the West (England), throughout his life Leach perceived himself as a courier between the disparate cultures. His exquisite pots reflect the inspiration he drew from East and West as well as his response to the basic tenets of modernism-truth to materials, the importance of function to form, and simplicity of decoration. This outstanding biography provides for the first time a vivid and detailed account of Leach's life and its relation to his art. Emmanuel Cooper, himself a potter of international reputation, explores Leach's working methods, the seams of his pottery, his writings and philosophy, his recognition in Japan and Britain, and his continuing legacy, bringing into sharp focus a complex man who captured in his work as a potter the "still center" that always eluded him in his tumultuous personal life. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Ever since the 1910s Zurich Kunstgewerbemuseum, or Museum of Arts & Crafts - which was founded in 1875 and is known today as the Museum fur Gestaltung Zurich - has been focussing on producing high-quality posters to promote its exhibitions. The posters serve to project the museum's visual identity into the public space while at the same time documenting the variety of themes presented there. Their high recongition factor is achieved not through rigid corporate designs but by means of graphical quality, versatile design approaches, and meticulous printing. By the 1920s, the pictorial scenes of the early days were already being supplanted by graphic and typographic solutions, following the lead of the Russian Constructivists. Formal and substantive reduction was characteristic of the Swiss Style, which - whether rigorous or more playful - dominated the Swiss cultural poster until the 1960s. From around 1970 designers began to expermient more freely, due in part to the use of computer programs as new design tools. Posters from the late 1980s impressively demonstrate how the legacy of Swiss Style lives on as a fertile resource, continually being reinterpreted in fresh new ways. Innovative approaches by young designers deliver some surprises in the contemporary posters.

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.

In this acclaimed revisionist study, Erika Doss chronicles an historic cultural change in American art from the dominance of regionalism in the 1930s to abstract expressionism in the 1940s. She centers her study on Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, Benton's foremost student in the early thirties, charting Pollock's early imitation of Benton's style before his radical move to abstraction. By situating painting within the evolving sociopolitical and cultural context of the Depression and the Cold War, Doss explains the reasons for this change and casts light on its significance for contemporary culture.
"A welcome addition to the growing body of literature that deals with the art and culture of the depression and cold war eras. It is a pioneering work that makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of a puzzling conundrum of American art--the shift from regionalism to abstract expressionism."--M. Sue Kendall, "Winterthur Portfolio"
"An important scholarly contribution. . . . This book will stand as a step along the way to a better understanding of the most amazing transition in the art of our tumultuous century."--James G. Rogers, Jr., "Art Journal"
"A valuable and interesting book that restores continuity and political context to the decades of depression and war."--Marlene Park, "American Historical Review"

Mathew's standard biography of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) is based on extensive research in archives in this country and family records in France. An important artist in the salons of Paris, Tanner was born and studied in Philadelphia but left America for Europe, where his race would not stand in the way of his ambition.

Kathleen McCarthy here presents the first book-length treatment of the vital role middle- and upper-class women played in the development of American museums in the century after 1830. By promoting undervalued areas of artistic endeavor, from folk art to the avant-garde, such prominent individuals as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller were able to launch national feminist reform movements, forge extensive nonprofit marketing systems, and "feminize" new occupations.

Originally published in 1940, this book charts the origins and evolution of academies of art from the sixteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Pevsner expertly explains the political, religious and mercantile forces affecting the education of artists in various countries in Western Europe, and the growing 'academisation' of artistic training that he saw is his own day. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the various historical schools of art instruction and the history of art more generally.

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.

Awarded an Honourable Mention by the Association for Israeli Studies. Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of "civilian militarism", Roei employs the theory of various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, landscape theory, and aesthetics, to explore the potential of visual art to communicate military excesses to its viewers. This study builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to discuss the complexities of visuality, the visible and non-visible, arguing for art's capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct their visibility. Images and artworks are often read either out of context, on purely aesthetic or art-historical ground, or as cultural artefacts whose aesthetics play a minor role in their significance. This book breaks with both traditions as it approaches all art, both high and popular art, as part of the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This approach allows a new theory of the image to come forth, where the relation between the political and the aesthetic is one of exchange, rather than exclusion.

Bringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment. Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media. To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their "environmentality" produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.