Mycket har skrivits om de charmiga artisterna i Rackstad. Fakta har blandats med fantasifulla bera ttelser, och allt har fa tt ett legendens skimmer. Ut ur detta myller av skildringar har jag framforskat, bekra ftat, samlat information och stoff till Rackstaddansen under 25 a r. Pa sa sa tt kan boken vara en resurs fo r konsta lskare fra n hela va rlden som la ser svenska eller engelska da den a ven ges ut som The Rackstad Dance. Som barnbarn till tva av skaparna, upplevde jag konstna rerna och hantverkarna och kan se framfo r mig hemmiljo er och situationer, ho ra ljudet av artisternas ro ster och minnas gester och kroppsspra k. Konstverket runt omslaget symboliserar den skickliga blandningen av konst och hantverk som Rackstadskonstna rskoloni stod fo r. Den enasta ende bonaden skapades i Sandstaberg vid Racken 1906 av syskonen Sahlstro m. Senapsfa rgen fo resta ller ljuset fra n brasan och de ro da figurerna a r va nnerna som byggde en dynamisk gemenskap av estetisk energi; la ngdansen a r det fantasirika samspelet av hantverksexpertis och konstna rlig inspiration vilket ta nde skapargnistan i kretsen runt Taserud, Myra, Rackstad, Perserud, La ngvak, Mangskog och la ngt vidare.

A monograph surveying the storied career of German artist Hans Haacke, on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition

Born in Germany in 1936, Hans Haacke is known for his intellectual and politically engaged art that has long shed light on systems of power. A pioneer of institutional critique, conceptual art, and environmental art, Haacke creates incisive, often site-specific works that call upon the viewer to engage or participate and thereby question invisible structural dynamics at play in society. This book offers an opportunity to revisit the artist’s thought-provoking career in light of contemporary culture.

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

This monograph of an innovative art installation documents not only the installation itself but also the visitors' interaction with it. The Wishing Ceremony consisted of six booths, each filled with wishing tokens and the wishes of past visitors; new viewers were encouraged to leave their wishes there as well, becoming part of the exhibit. The wishes, reproduced in this book, range from the mundane to the profound and allow an intimate glimpse at a common humanity.

Delightfully original, this book establishes Cubism's intrinsic connection to the traditional art of pictorial illusion The age-old artistic tradition of illusionistic realism known as trompe l'oeil ("deceive the eye") beguiles us with visual tricks and confounds our perception of reality and fiction. Presenting a radically new take on Cubism, this book shows how Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris parodied classic trompe l'oeil motifs and devices while inventing playful, original ways of challenging the viewer's perception. Insightful, handsomely illustrated essays explore connections between the Cubists and the trompe l'oeil artists of earlier centuries with whom they engaged in creative one-upmanship. Essays discuss the previously unstudied trompe l'oeil iconography within Cubist still lifes; the history of the trompe l'oeil genre and its changing status over the centuries; the materials and processes used in Gris's collages; Braque's grounding in trompe l'oeil interior decoration techniques; and more. Over one hundred illustrated works juxtapose Cubist paintings, drawings, and collages with related compositions by the old masters. This handsome volume, which reveals the surprising origins of some of Cubism's most recognized motifs, is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of modern art.

Gothic effigy brings together for the first time the multifarious visual motifs and media associated with Gothic, many of which have never received serious study before. This guide is the most comprehensive work in its field, a study aid that draws links between a considerable array of Gothic visual works and artifacts, from the work of Salvator Rosa and the first illustrations of Gothic Blue Books to the latest Gothic painters and graphic artists. Currently popular areas such as Gothic fashion, gaming, T.V. and film are considered, as well as the ghostly images of magic lantern shows. This groundbreaking study will serve as an invaluable reference and research book. In its wide range and closely detailed descriptions, it will be very attractive for students, academics, collectors, fans of popular Gothic culture and general readers. -- .

A must-have for the core contemporary art audience: Robert Storr's singular and long-awaited book is unprecedented in treating the full range of Louise Bourgeois's artistic achievement. In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what preface author Shirley Geok-Lin Lim describes as a "leap over the barbed fences that have kept these women apart in these, our United States of America." The sixty-two contributors have been shaped by colonization, wars, globalization, and militarization. For some of these women on the margins of the margin, crafting and showing their work is a bold act in itself. Their provocative and accessible creations tell unique stories, provide sharp contrasts to familiar stereotypes-Southeast Asian women as exotic sex symbols, dragon ladies, prostitutes, or "bar girls"-and serve as entry points for broader discussions about questions of history, memory, and identity.

From the Preface: The fact that so much of modern art has devoted itself to the exploration and assertion of its own identity is reflected in, but does not explain, the increasing amount of writing and talking on the part of contemporary artists. Rather, the whole history of the changing role of art and artists in a democratic, industrial, and technological society stands behind the spate of artists' words and the public's hunger for them--even some of the general public out there beyond art's little circle. Statements by artists appeal somewhat the way drawings do: they bring us, or at least they hold the promise of bringing us, closer to the artist's thoughts and feelings and to an understanding of his or her modus operandi; they hold the keys to a mysterious realm. And sometimes they offer us the sheer pleasure of good reading. Such is the primary raison d'etre of this book.Its other motivation is educational, and stems from the frustrating lack, in teaching contemporary art, of any single compilation of statements by American artists from 1940 to the present.... This anthology differs in several respects from those others that do include documents of American art since 1940.... The selection I have made is devoted exclusively to statements of artists; it is limited to the last four decades; it presents in a single volume a representative and fairly comprehensive coverage of major developments in American art beginning with Abstract Expressionism; and, whenever possible, it cities the first, or among the very earliest, documents signalizing a shift in the definition, intent, or direction of art."

It is in the wilderness of cities rather than in nature that the imagination of these landscape drawings comes to life. Without any heroic emphasis, these drawings result from the observation of traces, evident or discreet, in the urban landscape, and the process to collect and memorise traces is the way to consider memory as a primary medium for creativity. The selected collection of over 150 drawings, thought and imagined over many years, delineates a personal city experience, without any intention of building a new city theory. No single drawing in this book is a representation of cities in-situ; all of them are interpretations, translations, and combinations of traces collected and selected while teaching, working, meeting cultures, and eating food in many different cities around the world. These drawings are a different form of communication than the beautiful renderings produced in endless numbers.

Although a quintessentially English sculptor, Henry Moore experienced outstanding success in the United States. A man much admired and revered, he was the natural choice for corporate and civil commissions, with many seeing ownership of his work as an expression of rank and aspiring wealth. The fact that the United States contains the greatest number of his sculptures, as opposed to his home country, cannot simply be attributed to superior spending power. Based on original sources, and containing many previously unpublished images, Pauline Rose's book explores the reasons for Moore's fame in America, and the construction of his American persona. An autonomous, creative genius was a seductive and popular idea for the Americans, a perception encouraged by the photographs, films and writings of him in the press. The impact of Moore's presence was likely even stronger precisely because he did not fulfil the expected traits of either the modern artist or the modern celebrity. Rose's work focuses on contextual factors surrounding Moore's reception: political and economic imperatives within the United Kingdom and the transatlantic Special Relationship between the United Kingdom and America. Exploring the ways in which Moore was presented to an American audience via text and imagery and the influential network of his supporters which spanned the two countries, this insightful book examines a range of sculptural commissions in key American cities. His popularity is likely to be related to the ambitions of politicians and businessmen alike who perceived Moore's monumental sculptures as expressions of citizenship and humanity, particularly against the backdrop of the Cold War. This text is a valuable and innovative addition to studies on Moore. It will be indispensable to all those interested in twentieth century art history and cultural studies, Anglo-American relations, and the vibrant relationship between text and image.

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 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.

As beautiful and rigorous as an Escher work itself, this book is the classic study of a great maverick who so memorably linked the world of imagemaking with geometry and paradox. Escher's works, from the great master prints to numerous drawings, are brilliantly arranged to form a cinematic journey of discovery that reveals the magical world of the artist's mind, an uncharted realm lush with exotic conceptions and inventions.

"To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet" documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farm's anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkow's 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming. This text is the first international survey of twentieth and twenty-first-century artists who are transforming the global challenges facing humanity and the Earth's diverse living systems. Their pioneering explorations are situated at today's cultural, scientific, economic, spiritual, and ethical frontiers. The text guides students of art, design, environmental studies, and interdisciplinary studies to integrate environmental awareness, responsibility, and activism into their professional and personal lives.

This collection examines key aesthetic avant-garde art movements of the twentieth century and their relationships with revolutionary politics. The contributors distinguish aesthetic avant-gardes -whose artists aim to transform society and the ways of sensing the world through political means-from the artistic avant-gardes, which focus on transforming representation. Following the work of philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller and Jacques Ranciere, the contributors argue that the aesthetic is inherently political and that aesthetic avant-garde art is essential for political revolution. In addition to analyzing Russian constructivsm, surrealism, and Situationist International, the contributors examine Italian futurism's model of integrating art with politics and life, the murals of revolutionary Mexico and Nicaragua, 1960s American art, and the Slovenian art collective NSK's construction of a fictional political state in the 1990s. Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements traces the common foundations and goals shared by these disparate arts communities and shows how their art worked towards effecting political and social change. Contributors. John E. Bowlt, Sascha Bru, David Craven, Ales Erjavec, Tyrus Miller, Raymond Spiteri, Misko Suvakovic

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.

Presentations of offerings to the emperor-king on anniversaries of his accession became an important imperial ritual in the court of Franz Joseph I. This book explores for the first time the identity constructions of Orthodox Jewish communities in Jerusalem as expressed in their gifts to the Austro-Hungarian Kaisers at the time of dramatic events. It reveals how the beautiful gifts, their dedications, and their narratives, were perceived by gift-givers and recipients as instruments capable of acting upon various social, cultural and political processes. Lily Arad describes in a captivating manner the historical narratives of the creation and presentation of these gifts. She analyzes the iconography of these gifts as having transformative effect on the self-identification of the Jewish communities and examines their reception by the Kaisers and in the Austrian and the Palestinian Jewish press. This groundbreaking book unveils Jewish cultural and political strategies aimed to create local Eretz-Israel identities, demonstrating distinct positive communal identification which at times expressed national sentiments and at the same time preserved European identification.

The extraordinary life of a captivating American artist, beautifully illustrated with his dreamlike drawings Much of Joseph Elmer Yoakum's story comes from the artist himself-and is almost too fantastic to believe. At a young age, Yoakum (1891-1972) traveled the globe with numerous circuses; he later served in a segregated noncombat regiment during World War I before settling in Chicago. There, inspired by a dream, he began his artistic career at age seventy-one, producing some two thousand drawings over a decade. How did Yoakum gain representation in major museum collections in Chicago and New York? What fueled his process, which he described as a "spiritual unfoldment"? This volume delves into the friendships Yoakum forged with the Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explores the religious outlook that may have helped him cope with a racially fractured city, and examines his complicated relationship to African American and Native American identities. With hundreds of beautiful color reproductions of his dreamlike drawings, it offers the most comprehensive study of the artist's work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative creativity and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable biography. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: The Art Institute of Chicago (June 12-October 18, 2021) Museum of Modern Art, New York (November 28, 2021-March 18, 2022) Menil Collection, Houston (April 22-August 7, 2022)

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

A cultural history of modern lifestyle viewed through film and multimedia experiments of midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames For the designers Charles and Ray Eames, happiness was both a technical and ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things but also a vanguard life in media that the Eameses modeled as they brought film into their design practice. Midcentury modernism is often considered institutionalized, but Happiness by Design casts Eames-era designers as innovative media artists, technophilic humanists, change managers, and neglected film theorists. Happiness by Design offers a fresh cultural history of midcentury modernism through the film and multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their peers-Will Burtin, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Gyoergy Kepes, among others-at a moment when designers enjoyed a new cultural prestige. Justus Nieland traces how, as representatives of the American Century's exuberant material culture, Cold War designers engaged in creative activities that spanned disciplines and blended art and technoscience while reckoning with the environmental reach of media at the dawn of the information age. Eames-era modernism, Nieland shows, fueled novel techniques of culture administration, spawning new partnerships between cultural and educational institutions, corporations, and the state. From the studio, showroom floor, or classroom to the stages of world fairs and international conferences, the midcentury multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their circle became key to a liberal democratic lifestyle-and also anticipated the look and feel of our networked present.

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 examines the work of several modern artists, including Fortunato Depero, Scipione, and Mario Radice, who were working in Italy during the time of Benito Mussolini's rise and fall. It provides a new history of the relationship between modern art and fascism. The study begins from the premise that Italian artists belonging to avant-garde art movements, such as futurism, expressionism, and abstraction, could produce works that were perfectly amenable to the ideologies of Mussolini's regime. A particular focus of the book is the precise relationship between ideas of history and modernity encountered in the art and politics of the time and how compatible these truly were.