Arab graphic design emerged in the early twentieth century out of a need to influence, and give expression to, the far-reaching economic, social, and political changes that were taking place in the Arab world at the time. But graphic design as a formally recognized genre of visual art only came into its own in the region in the twenty-first century and, to date, there has been no published study on the subject to speak of. A History of Arab Graphic Design traces the people and events that were integral to the shaping of a field of graphic design in the Arab world. Examining the work of over eighty key designers from Morocco to Iraq, and covering the period from pre-1900 to the end of the twentieth century, Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar chart the development of design in the region, beginning with Islamic art and Arabic calligraphy, and their impact on Arab visual culture, through to the digital revolution and the arrival of the Internet. They look at how cinema, economic prosperity, and political and cultural events gave birth to and shaped the founders of Arab graphic design. Highlighting the work of key designers and stunningly illustrated with 600 color images, A History of Arab Graphic Design is an invaluable resource tool for graphic designers, one which, it is hoped, will place Arab visual culture and design on the map of a thriving international design discourse.

This book explores the interaction between collectors, dealers and exhibitions in Pablo Picassos entire career. The former two often played a determining role in which artworks were included in expositions as well as their availability and value in the art market. The term collector/dealer must often be used in combination since the distinction between both is often unclear; Heinz Berggruen, for instance, identified himself primarily as a collector, although he also sold quite a few Picassos through his Paris gallery. On the whole, however, dealers bought more often than collectors; and they bought works by artists they were already involved with. While some dealers were above all professional gallery owners; most were mainly collectors who sporadically sold items from their collection. Picassos first known dealer was Pere Manyach, whom he met as he travelled to Paris in 1900 when he was only 19 years old. As his representative, Manyach went about setting up exhibitions of his works at galleries in the French capital, such as Bethe Weills and Ambroise Vollards. Picassos first major exhibition took place in 1901 at Vollards. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Leonce Rosenberg came in after Vollard lost interest during the Cubist period, as they had a manifest preference for the new style. Like Vollard, later dealers often preferred the more conventional Neoclassical phase in Picasso. This was the case with Leonces brother, Paul Rosenberg. The book is organized chronologically and discusses the interaction between Picassos collectors, dealers and exhibitions as they take place. Once collectors acquired an artwork, their willingness to lend them to exhibitions or their necessity to submit them to auction had a direct impact on Picassos prominence in the art world.

In Kyffin Williams' centenary year, this monograph examines the life and work of an artist who, over six decades from Slade student to Royal Academician to knighthood, achieved both success and remarkable popular appeal. Best known for his rendering of the Welsh landscape, Williams conjured the mountains of Snowdonia with an instinct that stemmed from knowing every inch of the terrain since boyhood. Yet he was primarily conditioned by a European aesthetic. His espousal of a bold and thickly impasto painting-knife technique, using characteristic close tones, owes much to the affinity he perceived with Vincent van Gogh, but also with the French-Russian Nicolas de Stael, whose canvases he greatly admired. Williams' own passionate commitment to his craft and a restlessly creative make-up meant that his output was prolific across different media and genres. Indeed, his portraiture was regarded as highly as his landscapes. Featuring some of the finest examples of an impressive oeuvre, this book - scholarly robust and visually enticing - is essential reading for all those who appreciate the importance of this gifted British painter.

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.

A thought-provoking look at Aesthetic painting and its relationship to the changing technological landscape In the 19th century, the Aesthetic movement exalted taste, the pursuit of beauty, and self-expression over moral expectations and restrictive conformity. This illuminating publication examines the production and circulation of artworks made during this unique historical moment. Looking at how specific works of art in this style were created, collected, and exchanged, the book pushes beyond the notion of Aesthetic painting and design as being merely decorative. Instead, work by James McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, Albert Moore, and others is shown to have offered their makers and viewers a means of further engaging with the rapidly changing world around them. This multifaceted and thought-provoking study provides a radical new perspective on a mode of artistic production, linking it to the era's expanding visual culture and the technological advancements that contributed to it. In a period marked by increasing connectivity, this book shows how art of the Aesthetic movement on both sides of the Atlantic figured into growing global networks. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

In an age of 'ethnic cleansing' and forced migration, of contested borders and nations in turmoil, how have issues of place and identity, and of belonging and exclusion, been represented in visual culture? In Terra Infirma, Irit Rogoff examines geography's truth claims and signifying practices, arguing that geography is a language in crisis, unable to represent the immense changes that have taken place in a post-colonial, post-communist, post-migratory world. She uses the work of international contemporary artists to explore how art in the twentieth century has confronted and challenged issues of identity and belonging.
Rogoff's dazzling and richly-illustrated study takes in painting, installation art, film and video by a wide range of artists including Charlotte Salomon, Ana Mendieta, Joshua Neustein, Yehoshua Glotman, Mona Hatoum, Hans Haacke, Ashley Bickerton, Alfredo Jaar and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Structuring her argument through themes of luggage, mapping, borders and bodies, Rogoff explores how artists have confronted twentieth century phenomena such as the horror of the Holocaust, the experience of diaspora at New York's Ellis Island, and, in the present day, disputed and fraught boundaries in the Middle East, the two Germanies, the Balkan states and the US-Mexican border.

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.

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.

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.

American artist Louis Comfort Tiffany is most famous for his revolutionary and widely popular glass windows, lamps, and vases, but his contributions to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and design were so much more. Tiffany was also a painter, photographer, interior decorator, and designer of ceramics, enamels, and jewelry. This book presents more than 200 of the artist's works from the renowned Tiffany collection of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in chronological sequence, providing a biographical view of the man behind the famous glass.

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 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.

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.

Throughout his career, Gustav Klimt completed hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings of delicate beauty, many of them featuring the female form. Designed to imitate an artist's sketchbook, this gorgeous volume reproduces Klimt's most beautiful erotic sketches and watercolors. The experience of viewing them will awaken the senses and afford the reader the guilty pleasure of leafing through an artist's most private visions.

*** 'An indispensable volume' Vogue 'As rabid admirers and collectors of contemporary art and photography we wholeheartedly recommend this passionate and joyous book. Without art the human soul is unfulfilled. This collection by Russell and Robert fully explains why.' Sir Elton John and David Furnish 'Russell and Robert have made talking art not just pleasurable but necessary.' Lena Dunham 'As witty, wise and well informed as Russell and Robert's excellent podcast.' Edward Enninful, OBE When launching the Talk Art podcast in 2018, actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament had one clear aim: to make the art world more accessible. Since then, the podcast has grown to be a global hit, featuring exclusive interviews with leading artists, curators, gallerists, actors, musicians and fellow art lovers such as Lena Dunham, Sir Paul Smith, David Shrigley, Noel Fielding, Edward Enninful, Rose Wylie and Sir Elton John. Talk Art, the book, is a beautiful and accessible celebration of contemporary art, and a guidebook to navigating and engaging with the art world. Covering a range of different media from photography and ceramics to performance and sound art, the book explores the way art interacts with our society, highlights lesser-known artists, and provides a snapshot of the art world as it is today. With a wealth of imagery - some never before seen in print and some created exclusively for the book - and an informative, engaging narrative, Talk Art will become the must-have book art lovers return to again and again. The book features highlights from interviews with: Tracey Emin, Jordan Casteel, Jerry Saltz, Elton John, Grayson Perry, Ian McKellen, Alasdair McLellan, Helen Cammock, Somaya Critchlow and many more. Praise for the podcast: 'Lively, accessible and enthusiastic' - Financial Times 'As fast-paced and gossipy as it is genuinely interesting' - Dazed 'Trendy, gossipy, fast-paced conversational fun' - New York Times 'It's an education, but not in an alienating highbrow way' - NME

This project is the first to bring together such a wide range of local writers and perspectives. Project initiator and director Gavin Jantjes is a South African artist currently based at Norway's National Museum. Pallo Jordan, former Minister of Arts and Culture, supported the idea with seed funding to commission and develop the manuscript. Jantjes, together with editor-in-chief, Mario Pissarra of Africa South Arts Initiative (ASAI), commissioned and oversaw the exciting process of writing the book.

Flowers by Rosie Sanders is a large-format book that showcases over 80 of her finest flower paintings in exquisite detail.Often compared to the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, Rosie Sanders's botanical paintings lie at the extreme end of botanical art - they exude dynamism and sensuality in every brushstroke and their richness of colour sets her apart from her contemporaries. In this beautifully illustrated book, Rosie exhibits a selection of flowers, from tulips to orchids, roses to irises, anemones to amaryllis, and illuminates them with fascinating and skillful uses of perspective and light. This large-format book showcases her finest paintings in exquisite detail and they are accompanied by excellent and accessible scientific commentary. Also included is an introduction by renowned Swiss botanist Dr. Andreas Honegger.This book is perfect for artists want to get a closer look at a master's brushstrokes, textures and colour in paintings, or readers who are interested in contemporary botanical art.Chapters include:1. Diversity in the Garden2. Dark Flowers: the Magic of Night3. A Fascination of Orchids4. Lilies in Spring5. Varieties of Belladonna6. In Search of the Black Iris.

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.

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.

Numerous American women artists built successful professional careers in the mid-twentieth century while confronting challenging cultural transitions: shifts in stylistic avant-gardism, harsh political transformations, and changing gender expectations for both women and men. These social and political upheavals provoked complex intellectual and aesthetic tensions. Critical discourses about style and expressive value were also renegotiated, while still privileging masculinist concepts of aesthetic authenticity. In these contexts, women artists developed their careers by adopting innovative approaches to contemporary subjects, techniques, and media. However, while a few women working during these decades have gained significant recognition, many others are still consigned to historical obscurity. The essays in this volume take varied approaches to revising this historical silence. Two focus on evidence of gender biases in several exhibitions and contemporary critical writings; the rest discuss individual artists' complex relationships to mainstream developments, with attention to gender and political biases, cultural innovations, and the influence of racial/ethnic diversity. Several also explore new interpretative directions to open alternative possibilities for evaluating women's aesthetic and formal choices. Through its complex, nuanced approach to issues of gender and female agency, this volume offers valuable and exciting new scholarship in twentieth-century American art history and feminist studies.

In 1900, Swedish design reformer and social theorist Ellen Key published "The Century of the Child," presaging the coming century as a period of intensified focus and progressive thinking around the rights, development and well-being of children. Taking inspiration from Key-and looking back through the twentieth century-this volume, published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, examines individual and collective visions for the material world of children, from utopian dreams for the "citizens of the future" to the dark realities of political conflict and exploitation. Surveying more than 100 years of toys, clothing, playgrounds, schools, children's hospitals, nurseries, furniture, posters, animation and books, this richly illustrated catalogue illuminates how progressive design has enhanced the physical, intellectual, and emotional development of children and, conversely, how models of children's play have informed experimental aesthetics and imaginative design thinking-engendering, in the process, reappraisals of some of the iconic names in twentieth-century design and enriching the unfolding narrative of modern design with other, less familiar figures. Divided into seven sections-"New Century, New Child, New Art"; "Avant-Garde Playtime"; "Light, Air, Health"; "Children and the Body Politic"; "Regeneration"; "Power Play"; and "Designing Better Worlds"-"The Century of the Child" focuses on individuals and projects that represent innovative and comprehensive contributions to design for children.

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.