This revealing biography covers the life and art of painter Diego Rivera. Diego Rivera: A Biography presents a concise but substantial biography of the famous and controversial Mexican artist. Chronologically arranged, the book examines Rivera's childhood and artistic formation (1886-1906), his European period (1907-1921), and his murals of the 1920s. It looks at the work he did in the United States (1930-1933) and follows his career from his subsequent return to Mexico through his death in 1957. Drawing from primary source materials, the book reveals facts about Rivera's life that are not well known or have not been widely discussed before. It explores his tempestuous marriage to renowned painter Frida Kahlo and looks at controversial works, such as Rivera's 1933 mural for the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, which featured a portrait of Communist party leader Vladimir Lenin, and was officially destroyed the following year. Citations of many fragments of primary source material Photographs of important moments and persons in the life of Diego Rivera

'I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art' Lynn Barber, Sunday Times Now Grayson Perry is a fully paid-up member of the art establishment, he wants to show that any of us can appreciate art (after all, there is a reason he's called this book Playing to the Gallery and not 'Sucking up to an Academic Elite'). Based on his hugely popular BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures and full of pictures, this funny, personal journey through the art world answers the basic questions that might occur to us in an art gallery but seem too embarrassing to ask.

In June 2012, Jasper Johns encountered a photograph of the painter Lucian Freud reproduced in a Christie's auction catalogue. Inspired not only by the photographic image, but also by the physical qualities of the object itself, Johns took this motif through a succession of cross-medium permutations. He also incorporated into his art the text of a rubber stamp he had made several years ago, to allow him to efficiently decline the myriad requests and invitations that come his way: 'Regrets/Jasper Johns'. But the stamp's text also calls to mind the more familiar connotations of regret, such as loss, disappointment, and remorse, invoking an enigmatic sense of melancholy. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of this recent series of paintings, drawings and prints, created over the last year and a half through an intricate combination of techniques, this publication presents each of the sixteen new works in full colour. An essay by Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, MoMA, examine the importance of process and experimentation, the cycle of dead ends and fresh starts, and the incessant interplay of materials, meaning, and representation so characteristic of Johns's career over the last sixty years.

Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India's Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political participations and dissociations. Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sunderason activates, instead, distinctly locational histories that refract transnational currents. She analyzes largely unknown and dispersed archives-drawings, diaries, posters, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside paintings and prints-and insists that art as archive is foundational to understanding modern art's socialist affiliations during India's long decolonization. By bringing together expanding fields of South Asian art, global modernisms, and Third World cultures, Partisan Aesthetics generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization.

Few creative alliances flourished as productively as that of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Author Peter-Cornell Richter examines the lives of these artists to reveal the roads they took together and independently. Alternating biographical chapters interweave their stories. More than fifty exquisite reproductions of their paintingsand photographs illustrate how the two artists inspired and influenced each other, producing masterpieces of lasting relevance.

New Ways: The Founding of Modernism features the rise during the interwar period of a group of engineers, architects, sculptors, ceramicists, artists, furniture-makers, craftsmen and patrons to the forefront of British art and design. Important to the Founding of Modernism was the cooperation between a group of emigre architects and engineers, and their home-grown counterparts who, between them, found ways to bring into being the strict geometric and modernistic forms that were demanded by the Movement. In the 1920s, the technology of concrete casting was developing very rapidly as was that of steel reinforcement and new developments gave rise to greater possibilities for structures. Initially, expertise, and then the promotion of this new technology to architects and their clients, fell to a number of specialist overseas contracting companies. The early decades of the twentieth century in the UK saw, in place of an architect to contractor relationship, a rise of the new profession of consultant structural engineer. Up to this point, architects had fulfilled the role of both building designer and engineer. The British Modern Movement was profoundly influenced by this group of European emigre architects and engineers, some of whom remained in the UK thus ensuring that the Modern Movement re-emerged and continued in the UK once peace returned to Europe after WWII. Through an expert combination of words and illustrations, the author weaves an illuminating tapestry of people and structures in all sectors of life from residential to worship, media to entertainment, commerce and more thus creating a forceful appreciation of the movement. This fertile period of art, architecture and design was typified by a great commonality of purpose between designers, their clients and patrons. Buildings and artefacts were produced such that their designers might appreciate and wish them for their own use, especially in housebuilding and home-making. Friendships and associations by Modernists in allied professions presented a unified approach to design and patronage.

Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary 'material turn' and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern 'invention' of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design-Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented - critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children's use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.

This book provides an in-depth account of the protests that shook France in 1968 and which served as a catalyst to a radical reconsideration of artistic practice that has shaped both art and museum exhibitions up to the present. Rebecca DeRoo examines how issues of historical and personal memory, the separation of public and private domains, and the ordinary objects of everyday life emerged as central concerns for museums and for artists, as both struggled to respond to the protests. She argues that the responses of the museums were only partially faithful to the aims of the activist movements. Museums, in fact, often misunderstood and misrepresented the work of artists that was exhibited as a means of addressing these concerns. Analyzing how museums and critics did and did not address the aims of the protests, DeRoo highlights the issues relevant to the politics of the public display of art that have been central to artistic representation, in France as well as in North America.

Who are the spouses and lifelong partners of important contemporary artists? What attitudes and actions characterize the lives of these fascinating companions, many of whom are influential artists or arts professionals in their own right?
To begin to offer an answer to this question, longtime art collector Anna Lenz conducted twenty interviews with the life partners and wives of well-known contemporary artists, including, among many others, Elizabeth Goldring-Piene, wife of German multimedia artist Otto Piene; Karin Girke, widow to the late painter Raimund Girke; Rotraut Klein-Moquay, artist and wife of Yves Klein; and art historian and critic Antje von Graevenitz, wife of op-artist and cofounder of the New Tendency movement Gerhard von Graevenitz. With photographs by Roswitha Pross, the interviews are presented here, offering insight into the women's biographies and their lives with the artists. With great openness, Lenz's interview subjects speak of their families, life plans, and their own professional trajectories, as well as their initial meetings and long-term relationships with the artists. Together, the interviews offer an insightful--and highly personal--piece of contemporary art history.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was a major European artist and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose statements on art from the 1880s to the 1930s have been used by artists and writers on art for more than half a century. His criticism is provocative and penetrating, his style brilliant and entertaining. This is the most comprehensive selection of his writings to date.

The art of the Fang, the BaTeke, the BaKota, and other African peoples is extraordinarily vigorous and shows a brilliant sense of form. The substantial aesthetic impact that their works have had on the development of twentieth-century Western art on Picasso, Derain, Braque, and Modigliani, among others continues to this day. This classic study reveals the astonishing variety and expressive power of the art of a continent that contains more distinct peoples and cultures than any other. The revised edition has been updated throughout, incorporating recent research and additional illustrations, plus a new chapter and extended bibliography. It remains an invaluable resource for students and for anyone interested in African art.

A history of U.S. Civil War monuments that shows how they distort history and perpetuate white supremacy The United States began as a slave society, holding millions of Africans and their descendants in bondage, and remained so until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once slaves themselves. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves explores how the history of slavery and its violent end was told in public spaces-specifically in the sculptural monuments that came to dominate streets, parks, and town squares in nineteenth-century America. Looking at monuments built and unbuilt, Kirk Savage shows how the greatest era of monument building in American history took place amid struggles over race, gender, and collective memory. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves probes a host of fascinating questions and remains the only sustained investigation of post-Civil War monument building as a process of national and racial definition. Featuring a new preface by the author that reflects on recent events surrounding the meaning of these monuments, and new photography and illustrations throughout, this new and expanded edition reveals how monuments exposed the myth of a "united" people, and have only become more controversial with the passage of time.

This ground-breaking book follows the rise of a distinctive school of Australian art that first emerged in the 1940s. Beginning with the artists of the 'Angry Penguins' movement, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and Sidney Nolan, whose work exhibited a new strain of surrealism and expressionism, the book continues with the rich variety of 1970s work by Jan Seberg, Robert Jacks and George Baldessin, moving through to contemporary artists such as Rover Thomas and Judy Watson. Stephen Coppel traces the major developments in Australian art from the 1940s to the present day, and examines the significant interplay with the British art scene. The book includes a substantial essay outlining the major developments in Australian art since the 1940s, the reception of Australian art in Britain and the recent rise of Aboriginal printmaking. It features 127 works by 61 artists, and includes concise artists' biographies and individual commentaries on the works.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was a major European artist and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose statements on art from the 1880s to the 1930s have been used by artists and writers on art for more than half a century. His criticism is provocative and penetrating, his writing style brilliant and entertaining. The need for a comprehensive edition of Sickert's art-critical writings is overwhelming, and the texts gathered together by Anna Gruetzner Robins, a leading expert on the subject, prove that his contribution as an art-writer was a major one in its own right. The texts are presented chronologically and supported by notes which give the information necessary to situate the figures and events to which Sickert refers.

The 20th century has witnessed an explosion of diverse art movements, styles, and schools, with contemporary artists breaking traditional boundaries again and again. In more than 350 essays, the most popular and influential styles and movements are examined alongside recent experiments in new media--video art, land art, and computer art. The origins and artistic aims of such intriguing movements as the Donkey's Tail, the Kitchen Sink school, and the Stupid group are also fully covered. This is an ideal way to explore both the major and minor artistic movements of the last hundred years. The Grove Art series, focusing on the most important periods and areas of art history, is derived from the critically acclaimed and award-winning The Grove Dictionary of Art. First published in 1996 in 34 volumes, The Dictionary has quickly established itself as the leading reference work on the visual arts, used by schools, universities, museums, and public libraries throughout the world. With articles written by leading scholars in each field, The Dictionary has frequently been praised for its breadth of coverage, accuracy, authority, and accessibility.

Klimt, the most controversial artist of his time, enjoys incomparable popularity to date. This book offers a fascinating insight into the extensive work of the remarkable artist Gustav Klimt.

An account of the pictures and people that have played a role in the modern history of South African art. The story opens in the second half of the 19th-century and charts the course of modern South African painting, from the descriptive records of the "Africana painters", through the various experimental forms of modernism, to the revisionist perceptions of end-of-the-century South Africa.;The stylistic developments are dealt with in the context of the local circumstances and environment in which they occurred, but are also viewed against the background of world events and international artistic trends.;The sources, aims and characters of many different styles and individual works of art are clearly illustrated and explained. The reproductions of works of art have been drawn, where possible, from public collections, thereby affording the reader the opportunity to study the original works of art in conjunction with the text.

In Art versus Nonart, Tsion Avital poses the question: 'Is modern art art at all?' He argues that much, if not all, of the nonrepresentational art produced in the twentieth century was not art, but rather the debris of the visual tradition it replaced. Modern art has thrived on the total confusion between art and pseudo-art and the inability of many to distinguish between them. As Avital demonstrates, modern art has served as a critical intermediate stage between art of the past and the future. This book, first published in 2003, proposes a distinct way to define art, anchoring the nature of art in the nature of the mind, solving a major problem of art and aesthetics for which no solution has yet been provided. The definition of art proposed in this book paves the way for a fresh and promising paradigm for future art.