The first book highlighting the historical roots and contemporary implications of the silhouette as an American art form Before the advent of photography in 1839, Americans were consumed by the fashion for silhouette portraits. Economical in every sense, the small, stark profiles cost far less than oil paintings and could be made in minutes. Black Out, the first major publication to focus on the development of silhouettes, gathers leading experts to shed light on the surprisingly complex historical, political, and social underpinnings of this ostensibly simple art form. In its examination of portraits by acclaimed silhouettists, such as Auguste Edouart and William Bache, this richly illustrated volume explores likenesses of everyone from presidents and celebrities to everyday citizens and enslaved people. Ultimately, the book reveals how silhouettes registered the paradoxes of the unstable young nation, roiling with tensions over slavery and political independence. Primarily tracing the rise of the silhouette in the decades leading up to the Civil War, Black Out also considers the ubiquity of the genre today, particularly in contemporary art. Using silhouettes to address such themes as race, identity, and the notion of the digital self, the four featured living artists--Kara Walker, Kristi Malakoff, Kumi Yamashita, and Camille Utterback-all take the silhouette to unique and fascinating new heights. Presenting the distinctly American story behind silhouettes, Black Out vividly delves into the historical roots and contemporary interpretations of this evocative, ever popular form of portraiture. Published in association with the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

The contributions in this volume are based on a conference that was held at the University of the South in Tennessee (USA) in 2008. The papers investigate the impact Berlin's cityscape had on its artistic representation. In the first part, the impact of Berlin's city planning with its monumental Wilhelmine symbolism is explored in flaneur characters, e. g. in Georg Hermann's work. The main focus of the volume is on the second part with an investigation of the impact city planning had on Weimar Berlin's art and literature. In this section, a number of contributions show the interaction between space and art, e. g. in Walter Ruttmann, Hans Fallada and Alfred Doblin. The volume concludes with essays about the continuation of Weimar's modernism in contemporary culture.

From the music of Louis Armstrong to the portraits by Beauford Delaney, the writings of Langston Hughes to the debut of the musical Show Boat, the Harlem Renaissance is one of the most significant developments in African-American history in the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, in two-volumes and over 635 entries, is the first comprehensive compilation of information on all aspects of this creative, dynamic period. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclopedia of Harlem Renaissance website.

Critical facsimile edition making crucial modernist texts available for the first time since 1931 Restores a rare but highly influential modernist anthology to print in a new critical facsimile edition Provides extensive scholarly commentary, analyses, and newly discovered biographical information, setting the anthology in its broader cultural context Offers the first collection of avant-garde writing designed to be read on a 'reading machine' invented by the American expatriate poet Bob Brown Includes both Craig Saper's new Introduction and a separate chapter on the Contributors and their readies. Saper is the leading scholar of Bob Brown's work as well as an important scholar of experimental writing, media, publishing, and art This new edition of Bob Brown's groundbreaking collection of modernist writing experiments has been out of print since 1931, when Brown's Roving Eye Press originally published it. Only a few copies exist in archives today. The contributors include major modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, F. T. Marinetti, Eugene Jolas and Ezra Pound, key social realists like Kay Boyle and James T. Farrell and daring queer novelists and artists including Charles Henri Ford and Sidney Hunt. Providing extensive scholarly commentary, analyses and newly discovered biographical information, this book sets the anthology in its broader cultural context. This is an essential resource for those interested in print and book history, the politics and culture of the expatriate avant-garde and the reading machine's impact on reading, writing and literacy.

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.

This collection provides a transnational, interdisciplinary perspective on artistic responses to war from 1914 to the present, analysing a broad selection of the rich, complex body of work which has emerged in response to conflicts since the Great War. Many of the creators examined here embody the human experience of war: first-hand witnesses who developed a unique visual language in direct response to their role as victim, soldier, refugee, resister, prisoner and embedded or official artist. Contributors address specific issues relating to propaganda, wartime femininity and masculinity, women as war artists, trauma, the role of art in soldiery, memory, art as resistance, identity and the memorialisation of war.

This text provides a fascinating study of Michael Morgan's aspirations, his influences and the challenges he has faced on his extraordinary journey.

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.

The paintings of Paul Feiler (1918-2013), the focus of this first survey of the artist's life and career, were inspired by the English landscape, particularly the cliffs and inlets of the coast of south-west Cornwall. For his friend Peter Lanyon, Feiler's early works provided him with a sense of 'calm and I mean a sense of pause...To achieve that repose in the landscape I know one has to suffer the opposite.' Feiler's vision was based on the understanding that 'you stand vertically and you look horizontally'; through this he aimed to fulfil Cezanne's requirement that 'a picture should give us...an abyss in which the eye is lost.' He moved from painterly abstraction to an exploration of the elusive nature of space through the effects of narrow bands of colour, silver and gold in a pattern of square and circle, which he varied and developed over more than forty years. Based on full access to the artist's archive of letters, catalogues and photographs, Michael Raeburn describes how Feiler overcame many painful early experiences to achieve the meditative serenity of his deeply spiritual work. For all those interested in the history of modern British painting, this is a much-needed resource.

Denton Welch (1915-48) died at the age of thirty-three after a brief but brilliant career as a writer and painter. The revealing, poignant, impressionistic voice that buoys his novels was much praised by critics and literati in England and has since inspired creative artists from William S. Burroughs to John Waters. His achievements were all the more remarkable because he suffered from debilitating spinal and pelvic injuries incurred in a bicycle accident at age eighteen. Though German bombs were ravaging Britain, Welch wrote in his published work about the idyllic landscapes and local people he observed in Kent. There, in 1943, he met and fell in love with Eric Oliver, a handsome, intelligent, but rather insecure "landboy"-an agricultural worker with the wartime Land Army. Oliver would become a companion, comrade, lover, and caretaker during the last six years of Welch's life. All fifty-one letters that Welch wrote to Oliver are collected and annotated here for the first time. They offer a historical record of life amidst the hardship, deprivation, and fear of World War II and are a timeless testament of one young man's tender and intimate emotions, his immense courage in adversity, and his continual struggle for love and creative existence.

Fair Women was the Victorian equivalent of a 'blockbuster' exhibition. Organised by a committee of women, it opened to great fanfare in the Grafton Galleries in London, and was comprised of both historical and contemporary portraits of women as well as decorative objects. Meaghan Clarke argues that the exhibition challenged contemporary assumptions about the representation of women and the superficiality of female collectors. The Fair Women phenomenon complicated gender stereotypes and foregrounded women as cultural arbiters. This book uncovers a wide range of texts and images to reveal that Fair Women brought together fashion, modernity and gender politics in new and surprising ways. It shows that, while invariably absent in institutional histories, women were vital to the development of the modern blockbuster exhibition. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender studies, museum studies, feminist art history, women artists and art history.

Including over 100 illustrations from mainstream film to independent film, video art, performance and the visual arts, this important and original book explores how technology has affected artists' abilities and forms to express themselves.

From analogue photography to more recent artistic practices including digital imaging, performance robotics and video installations, Self/Image is one of the first full length studies to investigate the complex relations among these diverse artistic practices.

This will make an excellent companion to studies of contemporary art history, and media and cultural studies in the post-1960 period.

This book analyses the intermeshing of state power and art history in Europe since 1945 and up to the present from a critical, de-centered perspective. Devoting special attention to European peripheries and to under-researched transnational cultural political initiatives related to the arts implemented after the end of the Second World War, the contributors explore the ways in which this relationship crystallised in specific moments, places, discourses and practices. They make the historic hegemonic centres of the discipline converse with Europe's Southern and Eastern peripheries, from Portugal to Estonia to Greece. By stressing the margins' point of view this volume rethinks the ideological grounds on which art history and the European Union have been constructed as well as the role played by art and culture in the very concept of 'Europe.'

The story of their salt-glazed pottery that has a special place in the history of ceramic art.

This book uses intermedial theories to study collage and montage, tracing the transformation of visual collage into photomontage in the early avant-garde period. Magda Dragu distinguishes between the concepts of collage and montage, as defined across several media (fine arts, literature, music, film, photography), based on the type of artistic meaning they generate, rather than the mechanical procedures involved. The book applies theories of intermediality to collage and montage, which is crucial for understanding collage as a form of cultural production. Throughout, the author considers the political implications, as collages and montages were often used for propagandistic purposes. This book combines research methods used in several areas of inquiry: art history, literary criticism, analytical philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics.

In his fourth and final book in an acclaimed series on contemporary art, Irving Sandler, a leading authority on the subject, critiques art and artists of the last 25 years. Sandler discusses major and minor artists and their works, movements, ideas, attitudes, and styles, and places them in the social and cultural context of the period. An essential reference for understanding the art of this period. 8 color and 200 b&w photos.

This richly illustrated book details the wide-ranging construction and urban planning projects launched across Germany after the Nazi Party seized power. Hagen and Ostergren show that it was far more than just an architectural and stylistic enterprise. Instead, it was a series of interrelated programs intended to thoroughly reorganize Germany’s economic, cultural, and political landscapes. The authors trace the specific roles of its component parts—the monumental redevelopment and cleansing of cities; the construction of new civic landscapes for educational, athletic, and leisure pursuits; the improvement of transportation, industrial, and military infrastructures; and the creation of networked landscapes of fear, slave labor, and genocide. Through distinctive examples, the book draws out the ways in which combinations of place, space, and architecture were utilized as a cumulative means of undergirding the regime and its ambitions. The authors consider how these reshaped spaces were actually experienced and perceived by ordinary Germans, and in some cases the world at large, as the regime intentionally built a new Nazi Germany.

This is a revised edition of the bestselling book about the life and work of artist and musician Rory McEwen (1932-82). A legend in his lifetime and still admired thirty years after his death, his main legacy is the wonderfully luminous and detailed flower paintings he produced throughout his life, of anemones, auriculas, tulips, fritillaries, and of often battered, dying leaves or mouldering vegetables.

Fragmentation of the Photographic Image in the Digital Age challenges orthodoxies of photographic theory and practice. Beyond understanding the image as a static representation of reality, it shows photography as a linchpin of dynamic developments in augmented intelligence, neuroscience, critical theory, and cybernetic cultures. Through essays by leading philosophers, political theorists, software artists, media researchers, curators, and experimental programmers, photography emerges not as a mimetic or a recording device but simultaneously as a new type of critical discipline and a new art form that stands at the crossroads of visual art, contemporary philosophy, and digital technologies.

Reading African art's impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The "Black Art" Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde "discovery" of African sculpture-known then as art negre, or "black art"-eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, "black art" evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the Ecole de Dakar, African sculpture's influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history's alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The "Black Art" Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange. Each chapter focuses on a suite of films and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art-film nexus at successive historic moments.

This book is the first inter-disciplinary engagement with the work of Maqbool Fida Husain, arguably India's most iconic contemporary artist today, whose life and work are intimately entangled with the career of independent India as a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic nation. For more than half a century, and across thousands of canvases, Husain has painted individuals and objects, events and incidents that offer an astonishing visual chronicle of India through the ages. The 13 articles in this volume - written by distinguished artists, curators, anthropologists, historians, art historians and critics, sociologists and scholars of post-colonial literature and religion - critically examine the artistic statement that Husain has presented on the self, community and nation through his oeuvre. It engages with the controversies that have erupted around and about Husain's work, and situates them in debates around the freedom of the artist versus the sentiments of the community, between 'virtue' and 'obscenity', between an 'elite' of intellectuals and the 'common man', and between a 'work of art' and a 'religious icon'. Correspondingly it considers how India has responded to Husain: with affection, admiration and adulation on the one hand, and hostility and rejection on the other. This book is more relevant than ever before in light of the debates that have arisen over Husain's self-imposed exile for the last few years following a spate of violent attacks on his home and exhibitions in India, and his recent decision to forfeit his Indian citizenship. It will be of interest to those studying art history, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and politics, as well as to a wide spectrum of readers interested in contemporary issues of identity and nationhood.

Traditional postcolonial scholarship on art and imperialism emphasises tensions between colonising cores and subjugated peripheries. The ties between London and British white settler colonies have been comparatively neglected. Artworks not only reveal the controlling intentions of imperialist artists in their creation but also the uses to which they were put by others in their afterlives. In many cases they were used to fuel contests over cultural identity which expose a mixture of rifts and consensuses within the British ranks which were frequently assumed to be homogeneous. British Art for Australia, 1860-1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries represents the first systematic and comparative study of collecting British art in Australia between 1860 and 1953 using the archives of the Australian national galleries and other key Australian and UK institutions. Multiple audiences in the disciplines of art history, cultural history, and museology are addressed by analysing how Australians used British art to carve a distinct identity, which artworks were desirable, economically attainable, and why, and how the acquisition of British art fits into a broader cultural context of the British world. It considers the often competing roles of the British Old Masters (e.g. Romney and Constable), Victorian (e.g. Madox Brown and Millais), and modern artists (e.g. Nash and Spencer) alongside political and economic factors, including the developing global art market, imperial commerce, Australian Federation, the First World War, and the coming of age of the Commonwealth.