This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women's studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.

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 art of Edvard Munch is striking for the originality and universality of its themes, which cross moments in place and time. Yet he was very much an artist of the nineteenth century, and the focus of this publication is to show how especially in his prints and photographs Munch was enabled by technical advances developed by his contemporaries to create an entirely new visual language. Munch is probably best known for his desire to express emotions surrounding love, illness and death. However, the authors in this volume show that this preoccupation was not only based on biographical events but reflects wider contemporary debates on developments in medicine and science, including treatment of mental illness, as well as a proliferation of technical expertise in the production of prints. The arguments presented expand on subjects touched upon in the critically acclaimed British Museum exhibition Edvard Munch: love and angst (2019). Munch's remarkable prints were fundamental to establishing his international career, but there remains much to investigate in connection with the background to his innovatory techniques, his relationship with contemporary printmakers and his experiments with photography. The authors in this volume go some way to address these themes and outline future avenues of research.

The private art collection of the Hilti Art Foundation includes over 200 top-quality paintings, sculptures and photographs from Classic Modernism to the present day. Volume 2 of the two-part catalogue of the collection presents 120 selected works from the middle of the twentieth century to the present day, from Josef Albers to Thomas Struth. The part of the collection shown in Volume 2 contains in particular abstract and concrete art from 1950 to the present day which focuses on material, surface, space and movement as well as form, colour, rhythm and light. It includes works by Fontana, Klein, Manzoni, Uecker, Mack and Colombo as well as Albers, Bill, Fruhtrunk, von Graevenitz, Richter and Sonnier. There are major work complexes by Gottfried Honegger, Gotthard Graubner, Imi Knoebel and Sean Scully. A special position is occupied by photographs by Thomas Struth with their content aimed at civilisation and technology as well as nature and culture.

ToWhom It May Concern is one of the final projects Louise Bourgeois completed, and is an apt demonstration of the enduring power of her work. Rich pinks, purples, reds and blues describe bodies comprising swollen bellies, heavy breasts, engorged phalluses and stooped torsos are presented in a series of pairings on facing pages. Deceptively simple in design, the varying intensity and range of colour within each figure reveals a dynamism in each repeated coupling of these headless, limbless bodies: male and female at their essential, and the relationship between the two, changing but the same. Indiana's short, visceral but lyrical texts are interspersed throughout and form a conversation with these images, an unconventional non-narrative, part of a broader dialogue about the barrier of flesh, about desire and intimacy. This Violette Editions publication, developed in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, faithfully reproduces in reduced size the original large-format artists' book, made in fabric in an edition of seven.

By the end of John Cecil Stephenson's art school training - first a scholarship to Leeds Art School then to The Royal College of Art - he was in a position to produce still lives, landscapes and portraits in a professional capacity. Like many painters of his generation, who had received similarly conventional instruction, he became a competent teacher, appointed in 1922, as Head of Art at The Northern Polytechnic. In this mould Stephenson might have remained a largely undistinguished painter - but in the early 1930s he found himself at the centre of a group of artists with avant-garde credentials, and his own art underwent a remarkable transformation. By 1934 he was exhibiting groundbreaking works such as Mask (CAT. 7), at the 7 & 5 Society, and in 1937 was a key contributor to the watershed publication and exhibition Circle, where his work was showcased alongside that of luminaries such as Kazimir Malevich, Le Corbusier, Fernand Leger, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. What led Stephenson to become, in the words of the celebrated art critic Herbert Read, 'one of the earliest artists in the country to develop a completely abstract style'? Between March 1919 and November 1965, John Cecil Stephenson lived in London at No. 6 Mall Studios, off Tasker Road, Hampstead. As the father figure of what Read christened 'a nest of gentle artists', his next door neighbours included, during the course of the decade leading up to World War II, Barbara Hepworth, John Skeaping, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. Such fertile ground was further enriched by visits from artists fleeing persecution - including Piet, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Calder - just a few of the many internationally acclaimed artists who, whilst passing through London, formed part of the art set who congregated around Read's house at No. 3 Mall Studios.

A new, expansive study on Futurism which explores for the first time its relationships with other European avant-gardes during 1912 to 1939 Futurism was originally an Italian movement established in 1909 that strived for a radical rejuvenation of culture, not just in art but in all aspects of life. The concept of a new, all-encompassing aesthetic found its way to large parts of Europe and had a great influence on other avant-garde movements, something which has never before been fully explored. Futurism and Europe: The Aesthetics of a New World examines for the first time the many interconnections between Futurism and other European avant-gardes such as De Stijl, Bauhaus, Esprit Nouveau, and Russian Constructivism. Featuring a wide range of works, the book spans multiple mediums including painting, sculpture, architecture, interior and stage designs, graphic work and fashion as well as a variety of functional objects from furniture and carpets to design books, ceramics, and puppets. Covering various avant-gardes from 1912 to 1939, artists featured include Italian futurists, such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Fortunato Depero, Antonio Sant 'Elia and Enrico Prampolini, alongside other European artists Sonia Delaunay, Le Corbusier, Fernand Leger, Walter Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, El-Lissitsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, Fritz Lang, Paul Citroen, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Hans Arp, Duncan Grant, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin Exhibition Schedule: Kro ller-Mu ller Museum, Otterlo (April 29-September 3 2023)

The beginning of the 20th century saw literary scholars from Russia positing a new definition for the nature of literature. Within the framework of Russian Formalism, the term 'literariness' was coined. The driving force behind this theoretical inquiry was the desire to identify literature-and art in general-as a way of revitalizing human perception, which had been numbed by the automatization of everyday life. The transformative power of 'literariness' is made manifest in many media artworks by renowned artists such as Chantal Akerman, Mona Hatoum, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, William Kentridge, Nalini Malani, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, and Lawrence Weiner. The authors use literariness as a tool to analyze the aesthetics of spoken or written language within experimental film, video performance, moving image installations, and other media-based art forms. This volume uses as its foundation the Russian Formalist school of literary theory, with the goal of extending these theories to include contemporary concepts in film and media studies, such as Neoformalism, intermediality, remediation, and postdrama.

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.

Through the 1880s the very essence of representation, meaning and process in Western art were profoundly interrogated. Plausible representations of the external world were cast aside in favour of non-naturalism expressed in varying degrees, from modest distortions of reality to pure abstraction. The decades that followed, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation. Concentrating on this period of great upheaval, this book will explore the constructive dialogue between painting and sculpture, and the influential roles played by three giants of the era, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, across European art as a whole. While acknowledging the centrality of Paris as a cultural capital, it will also uniquely highlight other centres of artistic ferment in Europe, from Brussels and Barcelona to Berlin and Vienna, and track the variety of routes into modernism in the early twentieth century. This fully illustrated catalogue will contain four essays, introductions to each city of ferment and biographies of the artists. Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London 25 March–13 August 2023

How can we reconfigure our picture of modern art after the postcolonial turn without simply adding regional art histories to the Eurocentric canon? Transmodern examines the global dimension of modern art by tracing the crossroads of different modernisms in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Featuring case studies in Indian modernism, the Harlem Renaissance and post-war abstraction, it demonstrates the significance of transcultural contacts between artists from both sides of the colonial divide. The book argues for the need to study non-western avant-gardes and Black avant-gardes within the west as transmodern counter-currents to mainstream modernism. It situates transcultural art practices from the 1920s to the 1960s within the framework of anti-colonial movements and in relation to contemporary transcultural thinking that challenged colonial concepts of race and culture with notions of syncretism and hybridity. -- .

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

Canadian-born Agnes Martin was one of the pre-eminent painters of the second half of the twentieth century, whose work has had a significant influence both on artists of her own time and for subsequent generations. A contemporary of the abstract expressionists though often identified with minimalism, Martin was of the few woman artists who came to prominence in the predominately masculine art world of the late 1950s and 1960s, and became a particularly important role model for younger women artists. This groundbreaking survey provides an overview of Martin's career, from lesser-known early experimental works through her striped and grided grey paintings and use of colour in various formats, to a group of her final works that reintroduce bold forms. A selection of drawings and watercolours is also included. With essays by leading scholars that give a context for Martin's work - her life, relationship with other artists, the influence of South- Asian philosophy - alongside focused shorter pieces on particular paintings, the book will appeal to art students, academics and all those interested in abstract art. Presenting new research, and beautifully designed, the book is also an opportunity to introduce the life and work of Agnes Martin to those unfamiliar with her oeuvre.

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.

The painful, exquisite art of Mexico's favourite artist was a product of immense physical pain, and an emotional tumultuous life. The new book features the range and power of her heavily autobiographical work, from the early, disturbing explorations of personal suffering to the more dulled, painkiller-drenched paintings of her later life.

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.

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.

"Catherine Cusset's book caught a lot of me. I recognised myself" DAVID HOCKNEY "A perfect short expose of Hockney's life as seen through the eyes of an admiring novelist" Kirkus Reviews "Hers is an affirming vision of a restless talent propelled by optimism and chance" New York Times With clear, vivid prose, this meticulously researched novel draws an intimate, moving portrait of the most famous living English painter. Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney had to fight to become an artist. After leaving home for the Royal College of Art in London his career flourished, but he continued to struggle with a sense of not belonging, because of his homosexuality, which had yet to be decriminalised, and because of his inclination for a figurative style of art, which was not sufficiently "contemporary" to be valued. Trips to New York and California - where he would live for many years and paint his iconic swimming pools - introduced him to new scenes and new loves, beginning a journey that would take him through the fraught years of the AIDS epidemic. A compelling hybrid of novel and biography, David Hockney: A Life offers an insightful overview of a painter whose art is as accessible as it is compelling, and whose passion to create has never been deterred by heartbreak or illness or loss. Translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan

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.

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.

At the turn of the 20th century, Vienna became an epicentre for new thought. A multi-disciplinary environment emerged where music, writing and intellectual thought all flourished, often brought together in the capital's famous coffee houses. This was the time of Freud and Wittgenstein, of Mahler and Schoenberg, and of the Secession (1897-1905), the modern movement led by Klimt, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser that aimed to bring different arts together in a `Gesamtkunstwerk', a total work of art; of Jugendstil, Vienna's Art Nouveau; and of the Wiener Werkstatte, the workshop founded in 1903 by Moser and Hoffmann that revolutionized the decorative and graphic arts. There have been many exhibitions and publications devoted to this efflorescence, and even more monographs devoted to its key players. None, however, brings together a selection of visual material from across the different artistic disciplines as significant as this current volume, curated and authored by three leading scholars of the period. The book covers all areas of production: painting and drawing; decorative arts and crafts; applied art and book design; fashion, photography and architecture. In each section the illustrations take the lead, creating an invaluable visual reference point for all those eager to identify a given category of the arts within this period, particularly in the field of the decorative arts, from ceramics to glass, silverwork, furniture, jewelry; and graphic arts, from book design to posters and postcards. There are also many less familiar works in the field of fashion and photography, and a particular focus is given to the role of women in all disciplines of the time.