In this path-breaking new history, Maja and Reuben Fowkes introduce outstanding artworks and major figures from across central and eastern Europe to reveal the movements, theories and styles that have shaped artistic practice since 1950. They emphasize the particularly rich and varied art scenes of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, extending their gaze at intervals to East Germany, Romania, the Baltic states and the rest of the Balkans. While politics in the region have been marked by unstable geography and dramatic transitions, artists have forged a path of persistent experiment and innovation. This generously illustrated overview explores the richness of their singular contribution to recent art history. Tracing art-historical changes from the short-lived unison of the socialist realist period to the incredible diversity of art in the post-communist era, the authors examine the repercussions of political events on artistic life - notably the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the collapse of the communist bloc. But their primary interest is in the experimental art of the neo-avant-garde that resisted official agendas and engaged with global currents such as performance art, video, multimedia and net art.

Aimed to fashion students and designers, Palette Perfect is both a practical guide and an inspirational book that proposes a reflection on the universe of colour combinations, the moods and atmospheres they evoke and how we associate particular places and emotions to special colours. Each chapter explores a particular mood and describes the corresponding feelings and colour combinations, using as examples exquisite photographs of objects, still-lives, landscapes, interiors and fashion. At the end of each chapter, a wide variety of palettes representing the chapter's particular mood or atmosphere is included.

The majesty of Earth's most magnificent features was the domain of Wilson Hurley (1924-2008). In paintings of natural wonders throughout the galaxy, he was committed to expressing his love of the richness of reality. His journey to become a revered twentieth-century American landscapist is brought to life in this intimate biography. Written for appreciators, collectors, and working artists, Hurley's goals and procedures - from thumbnails to plein air field studies and finished studio paintings - are elucidated in depth, including a commission that resulted in five monumental triptychs of our nation's most prized vistas installed at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

The paintings and architecture by the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser are nothing less than revolutionary with respect to nature and individual creativity. His work is not about silent conformity, but about life itself: each individual, in society and in the environment. With their strong, colorful formal vocabulary, Hundertwasser's works allow nature its space. Even beyond his artwork, though, the Austrian environmentalist fought for new ideas and ideals. In many conversations, lectures, letters, and manifestos, he formulated his notions-from recycling, the greening of roofs and facades, and the democratization of living space-in order to lend them weight. What seemed like a utopia to his contemporaries is now urgently virulent and surprisingly current. Commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Hundertwasser's death, this attractive book compiles his statements, excerpts from his manifestos, his paintings, examples of his utopian architecture, and his ideas for the future.

This book is first to historicise and theorise the significance of the early twentieth-century little art colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production. Alongside a historical overview of the emergence of three critical sites of modernist activity the little art colonies of Carmel, Provincetown and Taos the book offers new critical readings of major authors associated with those places: Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O'Neill and D. H. Lawrence. Geneva M. Gano tracks the radical thought and aesthetic innovation that emerged from these villages, revealing a surprisingly dynamic circulation of persons, objects and ideas between the country and the city and producing modernisms that were cosmopolitan in character yet also site-specific.

Learn to draw from the work of amazing artists such as Albert Dorne and Norman Rockwell, the founding artists of the Famous Artists School. The artwork presented in Drawing Lessons from the Golden Age of Illustration is gleaned from the amazing collection of more than 5,000 artworks and hundreds of thousands of other documents found in the Norman Rockwell Museum. Organized as a series of lessons in classic drawing technique, each chapter offers both process and finished works by the founding artists and other instructors of the Famous Artists School, allowing readers to see a wide variety of approaches for learning how to draw, styles of rendering, and enlightening examples of "before and after" student work. Enriched throughout with fascinating sidebars and photographs documenting the working methods of master realists, Drawing Lessons from the Golden Age of Illustration is an invaluable trove of inspiration and information on how to draw.

With the words 'A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,' Jean Moreas announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist artists broke with the past and paved the way for the heterogeneity and penchant for risk-taking that characterizes modern art. The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.

This edited volume examines the history of abstract art across Latin America after 1945. This form of art grew in popularity across the Americas in the postwar period, often serving to affirm a sense of being modern and the right of Latin America to assume the leading role Europe had played before World War II. Latin American artists practiced gestural and geometric abstraction, though the history of art has favored the latter. Recent scholarship, for instance, has focused on geometric abstraction from Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. The book aims to expand the map and consider this phenomenon as it developed in neglected regions such as Central America and the Andes, investigatinghow this style came to stand in for Latin American contemporary art.

The collections of twentieth-century paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, have developed largely through the generosity of individuals. Notable among these in the early decades of the century were Frank Hindley Smith and Mrs W F R Weldon, while since the Second World War the Museum's collections have been enriched through gifts and requests from Thomas Balston, R A P Bevan, Molly Freeman, Christopher Hewett and others. This book gives the reader a taste of the wide range of the collection, with its representative group of Camden Town and Euston Road School pictures, and important early works by Bonnard, Picasso and Matisse.

Lemke's book proffers a bold new account of the origins of modernism. By focusing upon cubism, primitivist-modernism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance, Lemke demonstrates that black art exerted a crucial if masked presence in both Euro-American high art and popular culture. American and European modernism each owes much of its symbolic capital to its black cultural other.

Silvio Gaggi's survey of the vast terrain of twentieth century arts and ideas is unique not only for its scope but also for the clarity and cohesiveness it brings to wide-ranging, seemingly disparate works. By identifying underlying epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical issues. Gaggi draws connections among such modern and postmodern masterpieces as Pirandello's and Brecht's theater, Fowles's and Barth's fiction, Warhol's paintings, Godard's and Bergman's films, and Derrida's literary theory. Modern/Postmodern begins with a discussion of the profound skepticism-about traditional beliefs and about our ability to know the self-that lies at the heart of both modernism and postmodernism. Gaggi identifies the modernist response to this doubt as the rejection of mimesis in favor of a purely formalistic or expressionistic art. The postmodern response, on the other hand, is above all to create art that is self-referential (concerned with art itself, the history of art, or its processes). Drawing from the work of Piranadello and Brecht, paradigms that can be applies to many different art works, Gaggi emphasizes how these works from diverse media relate to one another and what their relationships are to the contemporary artistic and philosophical climate. He concentrates on the works themselves, but examines theory as a parallel manifestation of the same obsessions that inform recent literature and art. Gaggi asks, finally, if self-referential art can also be politically and ethically engaged with the reality outside it. He concludes that the postmodern obsession with language, narrativity, and artifice is not necessarily a decadent indulgence but is, at its best, an honest inquiry into the problems, questions, and paradoxes of language. Modern/Postmodern is a lively approach to postmodern art that will interest all students and scholars of contemporary art and literature.

Mysterious and mathematical at once, the magical visual world of Dutch artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972) has captivated scientists and scholars and made its mark on popular culture, inspiring book covers, album art, films, posters, and puzzles. This set puts Escher's tessellated wonders right at your fingertips with 17 easy-to-assemble paper sculptures. Folding along the score lines, you can transform the artist's richly geometric designs into three-dimensional polyhedra with forming and reforming patterns, including genius arrangements of flowers, butterflies, lizards, and seashells. The book includes a review of the geometric principles and artistic invention underlying Escher's optical marvels as well as concise instructions.

Modern Art takes the reader through individual movements from Impressionism to Conceptual Art, situating these within five broader chronological themes. Starting with Impressionism in 1860, Dempsey proceeds through the essentials of Modernism, the post-war New Disorder and beyond. The material is arranged with great care to lead the reader through over seventy essential topics of modern art in a practical and easy-to-navigate structure. Each boldly designed feature includes a clear definition of the theme, a list of key artists, features, media and collections, and expertly curated illustrations with explanatory captions. A reference section includes a useful glossary of modern art terms, an easy-to-navigate timeline and suggestions for further reading.

'There's no place like home'; 'safe as houses'; 'home is where the heart is': ideas of the house and home are rich in cultural cliches and contradictory meanings. Playing at Home explores the different ways in which artists have engaged with this popular everyday theme - from 'broken homes' to haunted houses, doll's houses, mobile homes and greenhouses. The book considers how issues of gender, identity, class and place can overlap and interact in our relationships with 'home', and how certain artworks disturb our comfortable ideas of what it means to be 'at home'. While other books have touched on examples of the 'uncanny' and surreal presentation of houses in art, this one argues that an understanding of the role of irony and play, and the critical potential of the 'everyday', are equally important in our interpretations of these intriguing works. The author draws on the work of philosophers, cultural theorists and art critics to enrich our understanding of this genre. Covering the work of well-known artists, including Tracey Emin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker, Vito Acconci, Michael Landy, Richard Wilson, Mike Kelley and Louise Bourgeois, the book also looks at artists who travel across continents, for whom home is a shifting notion, such as Do-Ho Suh and Pascale Marthine Tayou. Discussing a wide range of media, including installation and film, and richly illustrated, Playing at Home is a compelling survey of one of contemporary art's popular themes.

Science and art are both manifestations of beauty and creativity. Both are related to nature and are products of evolution. Understanding natural phenomena and the appreciation of beauty has conferred an evolutionary advantage to the human species. As mankind has evolved intellectually and socially and as science has progressed, artistic creations by humans have tended towards increasing harmony with nature and they have become more abstract - like mathematics, which is the abstraction of all sciences. The authors of this unusual work postulate some critical ideas on science, art and aesthetics, and establish that we need both, a scientific temper and the temper of art. Evidence to support these theses is drawn from mathematics, physics, studies in molecular biology, and also from music, fine art and design. Readers are taken through lucid prose with the help of illustrations of natural phenomenon such as spiral galaxies, spider web, the Fibonacci series and fractals in lightning, and of products of human creativity such as paintings of masters like Picasso, Husain and Escher, musical pieces, textile fragments and Ajanta caves frescoes.

"A Companion to Contemporary Art" is a major survey covering the major works and movements, the most important theoretical developments, and the historical, social, political, and aesthetic issues in contemporary art since 1945, primarily in the Euro-American context.
Collects 27 original essays by expert scholars describing the current state of scholarship in art history and visual studies, and pointing to future directions in the field.
Contains dual chronological and thematic coverage of the major themes in the art of our time: politics, culture wars, public space, diaspora, the artist, identity politics, the body, and visual culture.
Offers synthetic analysis, as well as new approaches to, debates central to the visual arts since 1945 such as those addressing formalism, the avant-garde, the role of the artist, technology and art, and the society of the spectacle.

How are love and emotion embodied in material form? "Love Objects" explores the emotional potency of things, addressing how objects can function as fetishes, symbols and representations, active participants in and mediators of our relationships, as well as tokens of affection, symbols of virility, triggers of nostalgia, replacements for lost loved ones, and symbols of lost places and times.Addressing both designed 'things with attitude' and the 'wild things' of material culture, "Love Objects" explores a wide range of objects, from 19th-century American portraits displaying men's passionate friendships to the devotional and political meanings of religious statues in 1920s Ireland.

Qummut Qukiria! celebrates art and culture within and beyond traditional Inuit and Sami homelands in the Circumpolar Arctic -- from the continuance of longstanding practices such as storytelling and skin sewing to the development of innovative new art forms such as throatboxing (a hybrid of traditional Inuit throat singing and beatboxing). In this illuminating book, curators, scholars, artists, and activists from Inuit Nunangat, Kalaallit Nunaat, Sapmi, Canada, and Scandinavia address topics as diverse as Sami rematriation and the revival of the ladjogahpir (a Sami woman's headgear), the experience of bringing Inuit stone carving to a workshop for inner-city youth, and the decolonizing potential of Traditional Knowledge and its role in contemporary design and beyond. Qummut Qukiria! showcases the thriving art and culture of the Indigenous Circumpolar peoples in the present and demonstrates its importance for the revitalization of language, social wellbeing, and cultural identity.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the 'age of speed' but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and the visual arts by examining the potential for movement and transformation in the idea of stillness and the ordinary. It ranges widely in its material, taking Cezanne and literary responses to his still life painting as its point of departure. It investigates constellations of writers, visual artists and dancers including D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, David Jones, Winifred Nicholson, Wallace Stevens, and lesser-known figures including Charles Mauron and Margaret Morris. Claudia Tobin reveals that at the heart of modern art were forms of stillness that were intimately bound up with movement: the still life emerges charged with animation, vibration and rhythm. It is an unstable medium, unexpectedly vital and well suited to the expression of modern concerns.

The first publication of the unknown poetry of a major twentieth-century sculptor In 1955, long before he became famous for his abstract metal sculptures, John Chamberlain lived at Black Mountain College, writing poetry alongside Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. By the time he moved to New York City in 1956 and began to develop his unique sculptural style, Chamberlain had completed a series of poems with marginal comments by Olson and himself, but the work remained unpublished and unknown-until now. In Black Mountain Chamberlain, Julie Sylvester presents a facsimile of this fascinating typescript along with an introduction based on interviews conducted with Chamberlain in the 1980s, conversations in which he described the strong connections between the poems and his later work. At first glance, Chamberlain's delicate and quiet poems appear to be the antithesis of his bold and brash sculpture. But in the introduction Chamberlain says that in fact the way he made poems at Black Mountain influenced the way he made sculptures throughout his career: "It's actually doing things in the same way, with words or with metal. It's all in the fit." Beautifully produced, Black Mountain Chamberlain reveals a remarkable and unexpected new side of an important twentieth-century artist. Distributed for Edition Julie Sylvester

At 18, Corita Kent (1918-1986) entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles, where she taught art and eventually ran the art department. After more than 30 years, at the end of the 1960s, she left the order to devote herself to making her own work. Over a thirty-five-year career she made watercolors, posters, books and banners--and most of all, serigraphs--in an accessible and dynamic style that appropriated techniques from advertising, consumerism and graffiti. The earliest of it, which she began showing in 1951, borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible; by the 1960s, she was using song lyrics and publicity slogans as raw material. Eschewing convention, she produced cheap, readily available multiples, including a postage stamp. Her work was popular but largely neglected by the art establishment--though it was always embraced by such design luminaries as Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass. More recently, she has been increasingly recognized as one of the most innovative and unusual Pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionizing graphic design and making some of the most striking--and joyful--American art of her era, all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun. This first study of her work, organized by Julie Ault on the twentieth anniversary of Kent's death, with essays by Ault and Daniel Berrigan, is the first to examine this important American outsider artist's life and career, and contains more than 90 illustrations, many of which are reproduced for the first time, in vibrant, and occasionally Day-Glo, color.

This book reinterprets Wifredo Lam's work with particular attention to its political implications, focusing on how these implications emerge from the artist's critical engagement with 20th-century anthropology. Field work conducted in Cuba, including the witnessing of actual Afro-Cuban religious ritual ceremonies and information collected from informants, enhances the interpretive background against which we can construe the meanings of Lam's art. In the process, Claude Cernuschi argues that Lam hoped to fashion a new hybrid style to foster pride and dignity in the Afro-Cuban community, as well as counteract the acute racism of Cuban culture.