In June 2016, a French policeman was stabbed to death in a Paris suburb. His assailant gained access to the victim's flat, where he murdered the policeman's partner in front of their three-year-old son. While negotiating with members of the special forces, the murderer posted live footage of himself and his victims on Facebook. Acting in the name of the so-called Islamic State, the perpetrator, who would later be shot and killed, single-handedly applied one of the fundamental tenets of modern terrorism: it is not the act of violence itself that counts, but the images of it that are brought into circulation. Once released, nothing and no one can eradicate these images and the visual battle that ensues knows no winners or ceasefire. With the expert eye of an art historian, Charlotte Klonk documents the visual machinery of terrorism from the late nineteenth century to the present day. She shows that the propaganda videos form the IS are nothing new. On the contrary, perpetrators of terror acts have always made use of images to spread their cause through the media - as have their enemy, the state. This is an indispensable book for understanding the background and dynamic of terror today. -- .

August Strindberg and Visual Culture addresses the multiplicity of Strindberg's artistic and literary output. The book charts the vital intersections between theatre, aesthetic theory, and visual elements in his work that have been left largely unexplored. Rather than following traditional genre-bound critical approaches, this book focuses on the intermediality of individual works, the corpus as a whole, and their connections to a wide array of historical and contemporary artists, writers, photographers, film, theatre and museum practitioners. The book is beautifully illustrated, with many never-before-seen images from Strindberg's work, and includes contributions from actress Liv Ullmann, director Robert Wilson, and curator and museum director Daniel Birnbaum.

Lee Miller (1907-1977) moved to London in the late 1930s, just as a rich strand of Surrealist practice was burgeoning in Britain. Miller was central to its development and prolonged life after World War II, exhibiting alongside British Surrealists such as Eileen Agar and Henry Moore in often overlooked London exhibitions. This book is the first to present Lee Miller's photographs of, and collaborations with key British Surrealists alongside their artworks, to tell the story of this exciting cultural moment. Miller's photographs of noted continental Surrealists such as Max Ernst and E.L.T Mesens, taken while they were working and exhibiting in Britain, also feature alongside their works, documenting their enduring friendships with Miller and her husband, the artist Roland Penrose. Miller's interdisciplinary photographic practice acted as a conduit for the dispersal of Surrealist images out of the realm of fine art and into the worlds of fashion, commercial photography and journalism. A vital study for all students and enthusiasts of Surrealism and those enthralled by the enigmatic Lee Miller, this book reveals the social and cultural networks in which she was embedded, offering a holistic view of her work and the life of the Surrealist movement in Britain.

Discover some of the major 20th century artists in intimate settings. Paris Match magazine has followed, photographed and interviewed them exclusively over a period of more than 60 years. Paris Matchs exceptional archives are opened to us. They reveal rare moments at the heart of artistic creation: artists at work, in the intimacy of their studios and their secret gardens, surrounded by their families and friends. Take a unique look at Chagalls opera ceiling, Dalis awakened dreams, miros suns. Francis Bacons studies: beyond these incredible works, the editor penetrates to provide with an inside view of the lives of these geniuses. It contains never seen photo sequences of the following artists: Francis Bacon; Balthus; Georg Baselitz; Fernando Botero; Georges Braque; Bernard Buffet; Jean Carzon; Marc Chagall; Jean Cocteau; Salvador Dali; Paul Delvaux; Kees van Dongen; Raoul Dufy; Alberto Giacometti; David Hockney; Moise Kisling; Jean Lurcat; Rene Magritte; Georges Mathieu; Henri Matisse; Jean Miro; Pablo Picasso; Serge Poliakoff; Robert Rauschenberg; Herve di Rosa; Georges Rouault; Pierre Soulage; Antoni Tapies; Maurice Utrillo; Jacques Villon; Maurice de Vlaminck.

Davor Konjikusic offers an in-depth presentation and contextualization of the photographs created by Yugoslav partisans between 1941 and 1945. The book goes beyond an aesthetic depiction of the photographs; it also deals with the history of their use and function within one of the biggest anti-fascist movements in Europe during the Second World War. The photographs are used to trace the development of a movement that-while seemingly doomed to certain failure-nevertheless survived the most destructive war in human history. This book provides new answers to the question of photography's role as a medium and its significance and use in social movements.

At the outset of his career, Norman Rockwell was not the most likely candidate for long-term celebrity; he was just one of many skilful illustrators working within the conventions of the day. But there was something tenacious about his vision, and something uncanny about his access to the wellsprings of public taste. Although technically he was an academic painter, he had the eye of a photographer and, as he became a mature artist, he used this eye to give us a picture of America that was familiar - astonishingly so - and at the same time unique. It seems familiar because it was everyone's dream of America; and it was unique because only Rockwell managed to bring it to life with such authority. This was, perhaps, an America that never existed, but it was an America the public wanted to exist. And Rockwell put it together from elements that were there for everyone to see. Rockwell helped preserve American myths, but, more than that, he recreated them and made them palatable for new generations. His function was to reassure people, to remind them of old values in times of rapid change.

In this elegantly written and beautifully illustrated book, Nico Israel reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists-including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson-he argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history, and geopolitics, complicating the spatio-temporal logic of literary and artistic genres and of scholarly disciplines. The book takes the spiral not only as its topic but as its method. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou, Israel theorizes a way of reading spirals, responding to their dual-directionality as well as their affective power. The sensations associated with spirals--flying, falling, drowning, being smothered-reflect the anxieties of limits tested or breached, and Israel charts these limits as they widen from the local to the global and recoil back. Chapters mix literary and art history to explore 'pataphysics, Futurism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism, "Concentrisme," minimalism, and entropic earth art; a coda considers the work of novelist W. G. Sebald and contemporary artist William Kentridge. In Spirals, Israel offers a refreshingly original approach to the history of modernism and its aftermaths, one that gives modernist studies, comparative literature, and art criticism an important new spin.

This work tells the story of the spectacular artistic and engineering project of carving the American presidents' portraits on Mount Rushmore. It describes how it was conceived and carried out. The author was brought up in sight of Mount Rushmore and witnessed the work in progress.

First impressions count, especially in Milano. In this unprecedented photographic journey, editor Karl Kolbitz opens the door to 144 of the city's most sumptuous entrance halls, captivating in their diversity and splendor. These vibrant Milanese entryways, until now hidden away behind often restrained facades, are revealed as dazzling examples of Italian modernism, mediating public and private space with vivid configurations of color and form, from floors of juxtaposed stones to murals of minimalist geometry. The collection spans buildings from 1920 to 1970 and showcases the work of some of the city's most illustrious architects and designers, including Giovanni Muzio, Gio Ponti, Piero Portaluppi, and Luigi Caccia Dominioni, as well as non-pedigreed architecture of equal impact and interest. The photographs for the publication were exclusively created by Delfino Sisto Legnani, Paola Pansini, and Matthew Billings, each evoking the entryways with individual sensibility and a stylistic interplay of detail shots-such as stones, door handles, and handrails-with larger architectural views. The images are accompanied by outstanding written contributions from Penny Sparke, Fabrizio Ballabio, Lisa Hockemeyer, Daniel Sherer, Brian Kish, and Grazia Signori, together bringing a wealth of architecture, design, and natural stone expertise to guide the reader through the applied materials and fittings as well as the art-historical and social implications of each of the ingressi. As much an architectural city guide as an aesthetic study, the book provides the exact address and an annotated Milan map for all featured entryways, as well as the architect name and date of construction. In the well-documented realm of 20th-century Italian design, Kolbitz has stepped over the threshold and delivered a brand new area of inquiry in Milanese modernism. With the rigor of its multifaceted research, poised photography, and breadth of its featured hallways, this is an invigorating new reference work and an inside look at the city's design DNA across high to low architecture.

As Director of Exhibitions and Publications at the Museum of Modern Art from 1939 to 1967, Monroe Wheeler heavily influenced typography, book design, and the development of the museum exhibition catalogue. During his tenure at MoMA, Wheeler developed close relationships with many of the artists he exhibited and published. Season's Greetings is a volume of over fifty handmade art objects and limited printings that were sent to Wheeler from artists, many of whom he knew intimately, including never-before-seen work by such luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Ben Shahn, Miguel Covarrubias, Rufino Tamayo, Robert Parker, Roberto Montenegro, Herbert Bayer, and Max Weber. Essays by Allen Ellenzweig, Joseph Scott IV and Vincent Cianni establish the importance of this vast archive of art, letters, and ephemera, and highlight Wheeler's wide influence within his field. Season's Greetings is a fitting tribute to a man whose life's work centered on and celebrated fine art publications. Vincent Cianni is a documentary photographer and archivist for the Estate of Anatole Pohorilenko and the Monroe Wheeler Archive. He teaches at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City, and has authored two books, including Gays in the Military, published by Daylight Books in 2014. Joseph Scott IV, Philadelphia, PA, became caretaker of the Manhattan apartment of Monroe Wheeler in 1990 to assist with organizing and preserving this important archive. His work continues today, as executor for Anatole Pohorienko, to help finish cataloging the remaining material for Mr. Wheeler, Glenway Wescott and George Platt Lynes. Allen Ellenzweig, New york, NY, is an arts critic and cultural commentator currently preparing a biography of twentieth-century photographer George Platt Lynes for Oxford University Press. He is a contributing writer to the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide and has published in Art in America, PASSION: the Magazine of Paris, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and the online magazine Tablet. He has also published works of short fiction. His landmark 1992 illustrated history, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe, was reissued in paperback by Columbia University Press in 2012. He teaches in the Writing Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is a founding board member of The Robert Giard Foundation which offers an annual fellowship to photographers, videographers, or filmmakers.

The exhibition Maison Sonia. Sonia Delaunay and the Atelier Simultane is dedicated to the applied work of Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), with a focus on her textile design work. The accompanying catalogue includes the first scholarly essays on Sonia Delaunay's collaborations with silk industrialist Robert Perrier and couturier Jacques Heim, who were among her most important collaborators and previously unexplored. In addition, the publication provides the first overview of the role of Sonia Delaunay's simultaneous fabrics in the design of modern living and media spaces.

Now recalled as the infamous lover and patron of legendary photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Wagstaff here takes center stage as a leading American intellectual and cultural visionary in his own right. Philip Gefter s epochal biography traces Wagstaff s evolution from society bachelor of the 1940s to his emergence as rebellious curator, initially at Hartford s Wadsworth Atheneum, where he mounted the first exhibition of Minimalist art, and then at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he famously took on the trustees. In 1972, his fateful meeting with twenty-five-year-old, Queens-born Mapplethorpe would lead to his crowning legacy as world-class photography collector and cultural arbiter. Positioning Wagstaff s personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form, the formation of the gay rights movement, and New York just before and during the age of AIDS, Gefter writes of an intensely passionate, romantic odyssey and a celebrated union that would help transform contemporary art history."

On the centenary of the fascist party's ascent to power in Italy, Curating Fascism examines the ways in which exhibitions organized from the fall of Benito Mussolini's regime to the present day have shaped collective memory, historical narratives, and political discourse around the Italian ventennio. It charts how shows on fascism have evolved since the postwar period in Italy, explores representations of Italian fascism in exhibitions across the world, and highlights blindspots in art and cultural history, as well as in exhibition practices. Featuring contributions from an international group of art, architectural, design, and cultural historians, as well as journalists and curators, this book treats fascism as both a historical moment and as a major paradigm through which critics, curators, and the public at large have defined the present moment since World War II. It interweaves historical perspectives, critical theory, and direct accounts of exhibitions from the people who conceived them or responded to them most significantly in order to examine the main curatorial strategies, cultural relevance, and political responsibility of art exhibitions focusing on the Fascist period. Through close analysis, the chapter authors unpack the multifaceted specificity of art shows, including architecture and exhibition design; curatorial choices and institutional history; cultural diplomacy and political history; theories of viewership; and constructed collective memory, to evaluate current curatorial practice. In offering fresh new perspectives on the historiography, collective memory, and understanding of fascist art and culture from a contemporary standpoint, Curating Fascism sheds light on the complex exhibition history of Italian fascism not just within Italy but in such countries as the USA, the UK, Germany, and Brazil. It also presents an innovative approach to the growing field of exhibition theory by bringing contributions from curators and exhibition historians, who critically reflect upon curatorial strategies with respect to the delicate subject of fascism and fascist art, into dialogue with scholars of Italian studies and art historians. In doing so, the book addresses the physical and cultural legacy of fascism in the context of the current historical moment.

The London-based avant-garde movement Vorticism, like its continental counterparts Cubism and Futurism--and its English rival Bloomsbury--was created by artists, poets, writers, and artist-writers, as a project that defied disciplinary boundaries. Vorticism: New Perspectives is the first volume to attend to the full range of the movement's innovations, providing investigations into every aspect of the Vorticists' artistic production: their avant-garde experiments in print culture, art criticism, theater, poetry, exhibition practice, manifesto writing, literature, sculpture, painting, and photography. The rich and varied essays in this volume constitute a timely and comprehensive reassessment of a key chapter in the history of modernism, and will be of interest to scholars across the full range of the humanities.

Christopher Neve's classic book is a journey into the imagination through the English landscape. How is it that artists, by thinking in paint, have come to regard the landscape as representing states of mind? 'Painting', says Neve, 'is a process of finding out, and landscape can be its thesis.' What he is writing is not precisely art history: it is about pictures, about landscape and about thought. Over the years, he was able to have discussions with many of the thirty or so artists he focuses on, the inspiration for the book having come from his talks with Ben Nicholson; and he has immersed himself in their work, their countryside, their ideas. Because he is a painter himself, and an expert on 20th-century art, Neve is well equipped for such a journey. Few writers have conveyed more vividly the mixture of motives, emotions, unconscious forces and contradictions which culminate in the creative act of painting. Each of the thirteen chapters has a theme and explores its significance for one or more of the artists. The problem of time, for instance, is considered in relation to Paul Nash, God in relation to David Jones, music to Ivon Hitchens, hysteria to Edward Burra, abstraction to Ben Nicholson, 'the spirit in the mass' to David Bomberg. There are also chapters about painters' ideas on specific types of country: about Eric Ravilious and the chalk landscape, Joan Eardley and the sea, and Cedric Morris and the garden.

Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal over a period of seven years, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. Within its beautifully written pages, you will come to know a woman whose range of sensitivity-moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual-is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to making sculptures so finely painted that they would "set colour free in three dimensions." She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughter's journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself-and us-through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of colour and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art. A rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybookshowcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.

In Italy there has always been a tradition of making jewelery from semi-precious metal, as copies or prototypes of fine jewelery. Fashion Jewelery: Made in Italy moves chronologically through the last 100 years, with pieces from the beginning of the 20th century, through to the years spent under fascist rule, when jewelery had to be strictly made with local material such as wood, cork, straw, venetian glass and coral. The 50s and 60s allowed for the very first big names in fashion jewelery to arise: Giuliano Fratti, Emma Caimi Pellini, Sharra Pagano, Ugo Correani, Coppola e Toppo, Luciana de Reutern, Canesi, Ornella...The book reserves a special place for an important phenomenon that took place in Milan at the end of the 1970s - "Made in Italy" - when Italian fashion entered (and dominated) the international scene, and Italian designers such as Armani, Versace, Ferre, and later on, Moschino and Prada found incredible success all over the world. Throughout the 80s and 90s, and well into the year 2000 further names in fashion jewellery were pushed to the fore: Carlo Zini, Angela Caputi, Maria Calderara, Giorgio Vigna, Fabio Cammarata, Emilio Cressoni, Robert Tomas, Irene Moret, Silvia Beccaria, among others. The final section of the book is devoted to new talents, selecting ten designers whose jewels are particularly interesting and innovative. Famous houses that the jewellery was made for include: Bijoux Bozart, Biki, Carlo Zini, Chanel, Chloe, Coppla E Toppo, Edoardo Saronni, Emilio Pucci, Etro, Fiorucci, Flos Ad Florem, Gianfranco Ferre, Giorgio Armani, Giuliano Fratti, Irene Galitzine, Karl Lagerfeld, Luciana De Reutern, Marni, Missoni, Misterfox, Moschino, Prada, Roberto Capucci, Schiaparelli, Sharra Pagano, Ugo Correani, Unger, Valentino, Versace.

"A revelation. No one will ever view Andrew Wyeth's apparently tranquil works the same way again after reading this vivid and astonishing portrait of the turbulent, driven man who paints them. Richard Meryman has written a wonderful book."
- Geoffrey C. Ward

At its most fundamental level, this stunning and unique biography describes a distinguished painter's enterprise of transmitting emotion onto a flat surface. It explores all the factors that have combined to create Andrew Wyeth -- his childhood in a hothouse of creativity; his hypersensitivity; his formidable wife; his identification with people marginalized and misunderstood -- all which have made him an American icon. In the process, his realist works in watercolor and tempera, including the famous "Christina's World," have gained him a special and secure niche in the history of American art.

The book is a portrait of obsession -- how single-mindedness has affected Wyeth's relationships and transformed his world into a realm of secrecy and fervid imagination. Those who read this book will never look at Wyeth's work as they did before. It reveals the artist's dark depths, as well as the ruthless, angry, child/man fantasist who paints the basic brutalities of existence -- death and madness --that vibrate eerily beneath his pictures' calm surfaces.

Richard Meryman's narrative is almost novelistic, with its larger-than-life characters and subplots: the tragedy of C.C. Wyeth; Betsy Wyeth's campaign for independence and individuality; the byzantine 15-year-long drama of the Helga paintings; the eccentric and creative Wyeth clan; and the idiosyncratic land and people of Maine and Pennsylvania.

Based on 30 years of research, frequent visits and countless conversations with the artist, his family, friends, admirers and critics, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life is the only book about the man and the artist that gets behind his carefully guarded screen, tells the full story of his life and reveals his complex personality and the motivations for his paintings.

In 1913 Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase exploded through the American art world.  This is the story of how he followed the painting to New York two years later, enchanted the Arensberg salon, and—almost incidentally—changed art forever.  In 1915, a group of French artists fled war-torn Europe for New York.  In the few months between their arrival—and America’s entry into the war in April 1917—they pushed back the boundaries of the possible, in both life and art.  The vortex of this transformation was the apartment at 33 West 67th Street, owned by Walter and Louise Arensberg, where artists and poets met nightly to talk, eat, drink, discuss each others’ work, play chess, plan balls, organise magazines and exhibitions, and fall in and out of love.  At the center of all this activity stood the mysterious figure of Marcel Duchamp, always approachable, always unreadable.  His exhibit of a urinal, which he called Fountain, briefly shocked the New York art world before falling, like its perpetrator, into obscurity.  Many people (of both sexes) were in love with Duchamp. Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood were among them; they were also, briefly, and (for her) life-changingly, in love with each other.  Both kept daily diaries, which give an intimate picture of the events of those years.  Or rather two pictures—for the views they offer, including of their own love affair, are stunningly divergent.   Spellbound by Marcel follows Duchamp, Roché, and Beatrice as they traverse the twentieth century. Roché became the author of Jules and Jim, made into a classic film by François Truffaut.  Beatrice became a celebrated ceramicist. Duchamp fell into chess-playing obscurity until, decades later, he became famous for a second time—as Fountain was elected the twentieth century’s most influential artwork.  'Breezily entertaining...There's a fabulous cast of supporting characters on this busy stage' - The Spectator 'A delicious and deeply researched portrait of its time' - New York Times 'Part drama, part page-turning history, this paints the complexities of art and love in a seductive light' - Publishers Weekly

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.