Vivid color, organic forms, and a loathing of straight lines were just a few stalwart characteristics in the unique practice of Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000). A non-conformist hero, the artist, architect, and activist left a blazing trail of imagination and ideas in buildings, paintings, manifestos, initiatives, and more. Hundertwasser's best-known work is considered by many to be the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna, a structural synthesis of the vitality and uniqueness that determined the artist's entire oeuvre. For Hundertwasser, rational, sterile, monotonous buildings caused human misery. He called for a boycott of the modernist paradigm championed by the likes of Adolf Loos, and campaigned instead for an architecture of creative freedom and ecological commitment. A fierce opponent of straight lines, which he called "godless and immoral," Hundertwasser was fascinated by the spiral, drawing also on the Secessionist forms of Klimt and Schiele. This richly illustrated book traces Hundertwasser's style and vision not only for each building, but for society at large. From naked addresses at the end of the 1960s to worldwide architecture projects and alternative blueprints for society, author Pierre Restany explores Hundertwasser's most high-profile and innovative ideas in a thrilling introduction to a pioneering 20th-century mind. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Provides a single-volume introduction to the important connection of Frankfurt School thought and modernist culture Tyrus Miller's book offers readers a focused introduction to the Frankfurt School's important attempts to relate the social, political, and philosophical conditions of modernity to innovations in twentieth-century art, literature, and culture. The book pursues this interaction of modernity and modernist aesthetics in a two-sided, dialectical approach. Not only, Miller suggests, can the Frankfurt School's penetrating critical analyses of the phenomena of modernity help us develop more nuanced, historically informed and contextually sensitive analyses of modernist culture; but also, modernist culture provides a field of problems, examples, and practices that intimately affected the formation of the Frankfurt School's theoretical ideas. The individual chapters, which include detailed discussions of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse as well as a survey of later Frankfurt School influenced thinkers, discuss the ideas of a given figure with an emphasis on particular artistic media or contexts: Benjamin with lyric poetry and architecture as urban art forms; Adorno with music; Marcuse with the liberationist art performances and happenings of the 1960s. Key Features: Introduces well-studied major figures such as Benjamin and Adorno in a new light, while connecting their ideas with problems in modernist art and culture Offers a clear, thorough, and relevant survey of major ideas and figures Provides a revisionary view of the rigorous connection of Frankfurt School theory and modernist culture

The first extensive monograph dedicated to the work of Paolo Ventura (Milan, 1968). Ventura has established himself in the field of artistic photography, offering a singular and absolutely original interpretation of staged photography, an art form in which photography is the final product of a creative process which, in his case, involves the preparation of scenarios and mannequins: the latter, together with real characters among which the artist himself often appears, are the protagonists of his stories. In these three-dimensional settings Ventura recreates, and then fixes through photography, a mental space that refers to the atmosphere of “magical realism� and to the fairytale flavour of childhood, generating a deliberately surreal contrast with the depth of some topics involved (such as war, abandonment, memory, identity). The volume offers an overall look at the artist’s 15 years of activity, showcasing 21 series from 2005 to the present time, highlighting the evolution of his language which, in addition to photography, is also expressed through drawings. The monograph includes critical texts by Walter Guadagnini and Francine Prose, an interview with Ventura by Monica Poggi and biographical notes. Text in English and Italian.

An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the "avant-garde" in Paris and London Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before. Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.

Real Objects in Unreal Situations is a lucid account of a much-neglected subject in art and cinema studies: the material significance of the art object incorporated into the fiction film. By examining the historical, political and personal realities that situate the artworks, Susan Felleman offers an incisive account of how they operate not as mere objects but as powerful players within the films, thereby exceeding the narrative function of props, copies, pastiches or reproductions. The book consists of a series of interconnected case studies of movies, including The Trouble with Harry, An Unmarried Woman, The Player and Pride & Prejudice, among others, ultimately showing that when real art works enter into fiction films, they often embody themes and discourses in ways that other objects cannot.

Scotland has produced an astonishingly high number of men and women whose lives have inspired and changed the world. This book, illustrating just over forty portraits, represents only a few of them, but with Robert Burns and Walter Scott, Eric Liddell and Alex Ferguson, Bonnie Prince Charlie and Queen Victoria, it represents the flavour of the collection at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Enlightening Encounters traces the impact of photography on Italian literature from the medium's invention in 1839 to the present day. Investigating the ways in which Italian literature has responded to photographic practice and aesthetics, the contributors use a wide range of theoretical perspectives to examine a variety of canonical and non-canonical authors and a broad selection of literary genres, including fiction, autobiography, photo-texts, and migration literature. The first collection in English to focus on photography's reciprocal relationship to Italian literature, Enlightening Encounters represents an important resource for a number of fields, including Italian studies, literary studies, visual studies, and cultural studies.

The Reverend Howard Finster (1916 2001) was called the backwoods William Blake" and the Andy Warhol of the South," and he is considered the godfather of contemporary American folk and visionary art. This book is the first interpretive analysis of the intertwined artistic and religious significance of Finster's work within the context of the American outsider art" tradition. Finster began preaching as a teenager in the South in the 1930s. But it was not until he received a revelation from God at the age of sixty that he began to make sacred art. A modern-day Noah who saw his art as a religious crusade to save the world before it was too late, Finster worked around the clock, often subsisting on a diet of peanut butter and instant coffee. He spent the last years of his life feverishly creating his environmental artwork called Paradise Garden and what would ultimately number almost fifty thousand works of bad and nasty art." This was visionary work that obsessively combined images and text and featured apocalyptic biblical imagery, flying saucers from outer space, and popular cultural icons such as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Henry Ford, Mona Lisa, and George Washington. In the 1980s and 90s, he developed cult celebrity status, and he appeared in the Venice Biennale and on the Tonight Show. His work graced the album covers of bands such as R.E.M. and Talking Heads. This book explores the life and religious-artistic significance of Finster and his work from the personal perspective of religion scholar Norman Girardot, friend to Finster and his family during the later years of the artist's life.

One of the most prolific and successful artists of the Golden Age of American Illustration, J. C. Leyendecker captivated audiences throughout the first half of the 20th century. Leyendecker is best known for his creation of the archetype of the fashionable American male with his advertisements for Arrow Collar. These images sold to an eager public the idea of a glamorous lifestyle, the bedrock upon which modern advertising was built. He also was the creator instantly recognizable icons, such as the New Year's baby and Santa Claus, that are to this day an integral part of the lexicon of Americana and was commissioned to paint more "Saturday Evening Post" covers than any other artist. Leyendecker lived for most of his adult life with Charles Beach, the Arrow Collar Man, on whom the stylish men in his artwork were modeled. The first book about the artist in more than 30 years, "J. C. Leyendecker" features his masterworks, rare paintings, studies, and other artwork, including the 322 covers he did for the "Post. "With a revealing text that delves into both his artistic evolution and personal life, "J. C. Leyendecker" restores this iconic image maker's rightful position in the pantheon of great American artists.

This book explores the collaborations, during the mid-20th century, between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Between 1948 and 1962 the two institutions collaborated on three book projects-The Metropolitan Museum of Art Miniatures (1948-1957), The Metropolitan Seminars in Art (1958-60), and a print reproduction of Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1962)-bringing art from the Met's collections right into the homes of subscribers. The Met and the Masses places these commercial enterprises in a variety of contemporary and historical contexts, including the relation of cultural education to democracy in America, the history of the Met as an educational institution, the rise of art education in postwar America, and the concurrent transformation of the home into a space that mediated familial privacy and the public sphere. Using never before published archival material, the book demonstrates how the Met sought to bring art to the masses in postwar America, whilst upholding its reputation as an institution of high culture. It is essential reading for scholars, researchers and curators interested in the history of modern art, museum and curatorial studies, arts and cultural management, heritage studies, as well as the history of art publications.

Today, nearly a century after the National Fascist Party came to power in Italy, questions about the built legacy of the regime provoke polemics among architects and scholars. Mussolini's government constructed thousands of new buildings across the Italian Peninsula and islands and in colonial territories. From hospitals, post offices and stadia to housing, summer camps, Fascist Party Headquarters, ceremonial spaces, roads, railways and bridges, the physical traces of the regime have a presence in nearly every Italian town. The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture investigates what has become of the architectural and urban projects of Italian fascism, how sites have been transformed or adapted and what constitutes the meaning of these buildings and cities today. The essays include a rich array of new arguments by both senior and early career scholars from Italy and beyond. They examine the reception of fascist architecture through studies of destruction and adaptation, debates over reuse, artistic interventions and even routine daily practices, which may slowly alter collective understandings of such places. Paolo Portoghesi sheds light on the subject from his internal perspective, while Harald Bodenschatz situates Italy among period totalitarian authorities and their symbols across Europe. Section editors frame, synthesize and moderate essays that explore fascism's afterlife; how the physical legacy of the regime has been altered and preserved and what it means now. This critical history of interpretations of fascist-era architecture and urban projects broadens our understanding of the relationships among politics, identity, memory and place. This companion will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including Italian history, architectural history, cultural studies, visual sociology, political science and art history.

The 1970s was a time of deep division and newfound freedoms. Galvanized by The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique, the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, a new generation put their bodies on the line to protest injustice. Still, even in the heart of certain resistance movements, sexual violence against women had reached epidemic levels. Initially, it went largely unacknowledged. But some bold women artists and activists, including Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Adrian Piper, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero and Jenny Holzer, fired up by women's experiences and the climate of revolution, started a conversation about sexual violence that continues today. Some worked unannounced and unheralded, using the street as their theatre. Others managed to draw support from the highest levels of municipal power. Along the way, they changed the course of art, pioneering a form that came to be called simply performance. Award-winning author Nancy Princenthal takes on these enduring issues and weaves together a new history of performance, challenging us to re-examine the relationship between art and activism, and how we can apply the lessons of that turbulent era to today

Presenting the conservation challenges related to different media and materials of considerable art-historical value, the studies in this volume include symposium papers by art historians, physicists, philosophers, artists, conservators and critics, on topics such as accidental damage, working with artists, packing and transport, and installation.

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.

Robin Walz's updated "Modernism," now part of the "Seminar Studies" series, has been updated to include significant primary source material and features to make it more accessible for students returning to, or studying the topic for the first time.

The twentieth century was a period of seismic change on a global scale, witnessing two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the establishment of a global economy, the beginnings of global warming and a complete reversal in the status of women in large parts of the world.

The modernist movements of the early twentieth century launched a cultural revolution without which the multi-media-driven world in which we live today would not have been possible. Today modernism is enshrined in art galleries and university courses. Its techniques of abstraction and montage, and its creative impulse to innovate and shock, are the stock-in-trade of commercial advertising, feature films, television and computer-generated graphics.

In this concise cultural history, Robin Walz vividly recaptures what was revolutionary about modernism. He shows how an aesthetic concept, arising from a diversity of cultural movements, from Cubism and Bauhaus to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and operating in different ways across the fields of art, literature, music, design and architecture, came to turn intellectual and cultural life and assumptions upside down, first in Europe and then around the world.

From the nineteenth century origins of modernism to its postmodern legacies, this book will give the reader access to the big picture of modernism as a dynamic historical process and an unfinished project which still speaks to our times.

Engraved shell-cases, bullet-crucifixes, letter openers and cigarette lighters made of shrapnel and cartridges, miniature aeroplanes and tanks, talismanic jewellery, embroidery, objects carved from stone, bone and wood - all of these things are trench art, the misleading name given to the dazzling array of objects made from the waste of war, in particular the Great War of 1914-1918 and the inter-war years. And they are the subject of Nicholas Saunders's pioneering study which is now republished in a revised edition in paperback. He reveals the lost world of trench art, for every piece relates to the story of the momentous experience of its maker - whether front-line soldier, prisoner of war, or civilian refugee. The objects resonate with the alternating terror and boredom of war, and those created by the prisoners symbolize their struggle for survival in the camps. Many of these items were poignant souvenirs bought by battlefield pilgrims between 1919 and 1939 and kept brightly polished on mantelpieces, often for a lifetime. Nicholas Saunders investigates their origins and how they were made, exploring their personal meaning and cultural significance. He also offers an important categorization of types which will be a useful guide for collectors.

Companion to an exhibition organised by the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, SoQ presents the work of sixty-four New Mexico artists living and working in towns and villages south of the state's population centre, Albuquerque. The isolation of some of the artists' homes and studios distinguishes them from their 'northern' counterparts in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos. Freed by the pressures of gallery shows and the stimulation and influences of other artists, many of the artists have opted for the 'freedoms' allowed by living in remote and rural areas of the state. Representing recent works in a variety of mediums -- including painting, sculpture, photography, fibre art, ceramics, videography and earthworks -- this catalogue features a roster of established artists, both prominent and lesser known, including H Joe Waldrum of T or C, Elmer Schooley of Roswell, Luis Jiminez of Hondo, Iva Morris of Belen, Sharon Brush of Gila, and Jose Andres Giron of Reserve.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, PAGON (Progressive Architects Group Oslo Norway) was an alliance of young CIAM-affiliated Norwegian architects known for their innovative joint projects. As a group, PAGON went on to become largely overlooked in the history of modern architecture, even though its individual members – which included Sverre Fehn, Jørn Utzon, Arne Korsmo, and Christian Norberg-Schulz – became defining figures in Scandinavian and international modernism. This book tells the story of PAGON for the first time, offering a definitive account of the group’s projects, buildings, and approach, and demonstrating why PAGON’s projects are ripe for reappraisal in the international history of modern architecture. It shows how PAGON’s architecture constitutes a unique continuity between the Scandinavian functionalism of the late 1930s and the modern movement in the US, and an important transitional stage before the emergence of the better-known neo-avant-garde groups within CIAM and Team 10. Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, this bookfills a gap in our understanding of mid-century modern architecture and highlights the internationally diverse nature of the modern movement.

Did you know Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime and that during the last three months of his life he completed an average of one painting every day? Did you know that Michelangelo's David is covered in a dusting of human skin? Did you know Caravaggio murdered several people while he was painting some of the most glorious paintings of biblical scenes the world has ever known? Rembrandt Is in the Wind by Russ Ramsey is an invitation to discover some of the world's most celebrated artists and works, while presenting the gospel of Christ in a way that speaks to the struggles and longings common to the human experience. The book is part art history, part biblical study, part philosophy, and part analysis of the human experience; but it's all story. The lives of the artists in this book illustrate the struggle of living in this world and point to the beauty of the redemption available to us in Christ. Each story is different. Some conclude with resounding triumph while others end in struggle. But all of them raise important questions about humanity's hunger and capacity for glory, and all of them teach us to love and see beauty.

Still Modernism offers a critique of the modernist imperative to embrace motion, speed, and mobility. In the context of the rise of kinetic technologies and the invention of motion pictures, it claims that stillness is nonetheless an essential tactic of modernist innovation. More specifically, the book looks at the ways in which photographic stillness emerges as a counterpoint to motion and to film, asserting its own clear visibility against the blur of kinesis. Photographic stillness becomes a means to resist the ephemerality of motion and to get at and articulate something real or essential by way of its fixed limits. Combining art history, film studies and literary studies, Louise Hornby reveals how photographers, filmmakers, and writers, even at their most kinetic, did not surrender attention to points of stillness. Rather, the still image, understood through photography, establishes itself as a mode of resistance and provides a formal response to various modernist efforts to see better, to attend more closely, and to remove the fetters of subjectivity and experience. Still Modernism brings together a series of canonical texts, films, and photographs, the selection of which reinforces the central claim that stillness does not lurk at the margins of modernism, but was constitutive of its very foundations. In a series of comparisons drawing from literary and visual objects, Hornby argues that still photography allows film to access its own diffuse images of motion; photography's duplicative form provides a serial structure for modernist efforts to represent the face; its iterative structure articulates the jerky rhythms of experimental narrative as perambulation; and its processes of development allow for the world to emerge independent of the human observer. Casting new light on the relationship between photography and film, Hornby situates the struggle between the still and the kinetic at the center of modernist culture.

R. Sikoryak is the master of the pop culture pastiche. In Masterpiece Comics, he interpreted classic literature with defining twentieth-century comics. With Terms and Conditions, he made the unreadable contract that everyone signs, and no one reads, readable. He employs his magic yet again to investigate the very framework of the country with Constitution Illustrated. By visually interpreting the complete text of the supreme law of the land with more than a century of American pop culture icons, Sikoryak distills the very essence of the government legalese from the abstract to the tangible, the historical to the contemporary. Among Sikoryak s spot-on unions of government articles and amendments with famous comic-book characters: the Eighteenth Amendment that instituted prohibition is articulated with Homer Simpson running from Chief Wiggum; the Fourteenth Amendment that solidifies citizenship to all people born and naturalized in the United States is personified by Ms. Marvel; and, of course, the Nineteenth Amendment offering women the right to vote is a glorious depiction of Wonder Woman breaking free from her chains. American artists from George Herriman (Krazy Kat) and Charles Schulz (Peanuts) to Raina Telgemeier (Sisters) and Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For) are homaged, with their characters reimagined in historical costumes and situations. We the People has never been more apt.

Honorable Mention, 2021 Latinx Studies Section Outstanding Book Award, given by the Latin American Studies Association Winner, 2020 Latino Book Awards in the LGBTQ+ Themed Section Finalist, 2019 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Critically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlán—as Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this period—developed a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artists in the current moment. Hernández offers a vocabulary for this multi-modal avant-garde—one that contests the heteromasculinity and ocular surveillance visited upon it by the larger Chicanx community, as well as the formally straight conditions of traditional archive-building, museum institutions, and the art world writ large. With a focus on works by Mundo Meza (1955–85), Teddy Sandoval (1949–1995), and Joey Terrill (1955– ), and with appearances by Laura Aguilar, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, Archiving an Epidemic composes a complex picture of queer Chicanx avant-gardisms. With over sixty images—many of which are published here for the first time—Hernández’s work excavates this archive to question not what Chicanx art is, but what it could have been.

By what means did so much beauty and ingenuity appears in articles of everyday rural life in Portugal? How did the shape of these objects balance necessity and formal perfection so skillfully? This book explores the effect that generations of trial and error, individual craftsmanship, and an instinct to carve out the essential with the slenderest of means brought to objects that made life both livable and meaningful to a pre-industrial society. The objects photographed and described by designer Jasper Morrison may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest.