French poetry and painting are inextricably connected; one cannot be understood without reference to the other. Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Apollinaire in particular were deeply interested in the visual arts and themsleves influenced many painters. Alan Bowness explores the chain of personal contacts which underlie the evolution of modernist art and literature from 1850 to 1920, notably Manet's close friendship with Baudelaire and Mallarme, and Apollinaire's with Picasso.

Collage by Women presents 50 international women artists working in the field of collage today through a rigorous selection of their works. Curated by the Spanish collage artist Rebeka Elizegi, the book gives space to voices from all backgrounds, origins, and artistic expressions, and shows the wide variety of perspectives that are shaping the panorama of collage today, bringing to light a parallel effervescence of female artistic initiatives around the world. From emerging names to more well-known and established ones, the artists featured here are pushing back the boundaries of art. Collage by Women wants to call attention to the experiences and creative processes of artists that should be on our radar through an impressive selection of manual and digital techniques, topics and aesthetic choices, accompanied by texts that provide indepth approaches to the inspiration, influences and work trajectory of each artist. Born from the belief that women's voices are of the utmost relevance in all cultural and social fields, the book will surely contribute to a healthier, more comprehensive, more inclusive nderstanding of our reality.

Bakhtin and the Visual Arts assesses the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory, philosophy, theology, biology and psychology. In his four early aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he began to focus on linguistic and literary categories, Bakhtin worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth 1995 study of his aesthetics, especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and unfinalizability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the moral dimensions of creative activity.

"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.

What is contemporary art, and how did art come to be what it is today? How can we understand what a work of art means; and can't just about anything be called art these days? Contemporary Art Decoded takes ten key questions about contemporary art and uses them to what you're looking at, how it works, and why it matters. Steering clear of jargon, this book digs deep into the core ideas and concepts behind the art. It features some work you'll recognise, and some you won't, from some of the most exciting artists working today, such as Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama and Zanele Muholi. This book is guaranteed to make your next trip to a gallery more rewarding. Chapters include: - What is contemporary art? - Where did it come from? - Where do you draw the line? - Does it matter who makes it? - Does it have to mean something? - Can anything be art? - What about art for art's sake? - Has it all been done before? - Does it have to be so serious? - What's next?

Taking citizenship as a political position, cultural process, and intertwining of both, this edited volume examines the role of visual art and visual culture as sites for the construction and contestation of both state-sanctioned and cultural citizenships from the late 1970s to today. Contributors to this book examine an assortment of visual media-painting, sculpture, photography, performance, the built environment, new media, and social practice-within diverse and international communities, such as the United States, South Africa, Turkey, and New Zealand. Topics addressed include, but are not limited to, citizenship in terms of: nation building, civic practices, border zones, transnationalism, statelessness, and affects of belonging as well as alternate forms of, or resistance to, citizenship.

Maqbool Fida Husain (1913-2011) is a central figure in Indian modern art, and the most represented artist in Mathaf's collection. A founding member of the Progressive Artists Group, formed in Bombay in 1947, Husain played a leading role in revolutionising art in India by parting ways with the dominant genres of academic painting and miniaturist nostalgia. This book investigates the work produced in all six decades of Husain's artistic practice, and includes paintings, prints, poetry, architecture, textile and film. It is divided into three themes: first, the idea of home as a habitat, a repository of Husain's childhood memories, and a space of exploration; second, the human passion for creativity and knowledge; and third, a multitude of approaches to the cosmic and divine aspects of being - expressed in myths, philosophies, world religions, narratives and symbols. The book also presents Husain's portfolio on Islamic Civilisations, a series of 99 works commissioned by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser in 2007.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art at the High Museum, Atlanta, this catalogue features artwork produced during six key years, from 1913 to 2013. By concentrating on groundbreaking moments when major movements and radical strategies emerged, the book provides an overall sense of the innovations and achievements of the last century. With 1913 came new visual languages like Cubism and Futurism; 1929 focuses on the convergence of Surrealism and New Vision photography; in 1950 the emphasis was on large-scale abstract painting; in 1961 assemblage epitomized the merging of art and life; and 1988 witnessed the simultaneous embrace of identity politics and appropriation. A series of new commissions by three contemporary artists will represent the art to come in 2013. With its juxtapositions and disjunctions, Fast Forward shows an art history that unfolds messily but masterfully. Each of the six richly illustrated sections features a close reading of one major work from the period, complemented by an exploration of that year's aesthetic zeitgeist. The publication also includes an introduction by Jodi Hauptman, Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, and a timeline illustrated with documentary photographs that provide historical context.

The new, updated edition of the Skira best-seller on twentieth-century art. This handy manual is for those who wish to understand what art was in the last century and what it represents today. The book, whose structure is essential and synthetic, aims to divulge the pleasure of art to those who have never delved beyond its surface, and above all to describe how it has become spectacle and performance in recent years. Following an analysis of the theories and poetics that tempestuously traversed the historical avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes of the twentieth century and contributed to their extraordinary vitality, the author focuses on and explains the principal artistic phenomena that, starting in 1980, marked the period defined as post-modern, which was characterised by performance and a system of economic-financial art. The last chapter describes the arrival of postmodern up to its possible decline, marked by the social events of 2007 that, by abandoning the special effects of immateriality, has headed in a direction that is more tangible, worldly and concrete.

A provocative and absorbing analysis of the unprecedented eruption of misogyny at the turn of the century in the works of the key artists of the age. Illustrated throughout.

These sketchbooks have an extraordinary story behind them, created as they were in 1942, Alfred Wallis's final year, when he lived in the Penzance poorhouse. They shine new light on his contribution to the development of modern art in Britain. A Cornish mariner and scrap metal dealer, he was self-taught and started to paint in around 1925 following the death of his wife three years earlier. A potent influence in the late 1920s for artists Winifred and Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, his simple and direct style communicated a truth of experience that also came to personify the overriding character of St Ives as an art community that valued his authenticity of expression. The legacy of his art continues to inspire artists today. This book brings together the contents of three sketchbooks that Wallis filled with drawings. With an introduction by curator Andrew Wilson, it offers a remarkable insight into Wallis's art of memory made tangible. 'No, I don't think a good Wallis is representational it is simply REAL.' - Ben Nicholson.

This revelatory book concentrates on Scottish women painters and sculptors from 1885, when Fra Newbery became Director of the Glasgow School of Art, until 1965, the year of Anne Redpath's death. It explores the experience and context of the artists and their place in Scottish art history, in terms of training, professional opportunities and personal links within the Scottish art world. Celebrated painters including Joan Eardley, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and Phoebe Anna Traquair are examined alongside lesser-known figures such as Phyllis Bone, Dorothy Johnstone and Norah Neilson Gray, in order to look afresh at the achievements of Scottish women artists of the modern period. The book accompanies a show which will be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two in Edinburgh from 7 November 2015 to 26 June 2016.

The Living Death of Antiquity examines the idealization of an antiquity that exhibits, in the words of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 'a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur'. Fitzgerald discusses the aesthetics of this strain of neoclassicism as manifested in a range of work in different media and periods, focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the aftermath of Winckelmann's writing, John Flaxman's engraved scenes from the Iliad and the sculptors Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen reinterpreted ancient prototypes or invented new ones. Earlier and later versions of this aesthetic in the ancient Greek Anacreontea, the French Parnassian poets and Erik Satie's Socrate, manifest its character in different media and periods. Looking with a sympathetic eye on the original aspirations of the neoclassical aesthetic and its forward-looking potential, Fitzgerald describes how it can tip over into the vacancy or kitsch through which a 'remaindered' antiquity lingers in our minds and environments. This book asks how the neoclassical value of simplicity serves to conjure up an epiphanic antiquity, and how whiteness, in both its literal and its metaphorical forms, acts as the 'logo' of neoclassical antiquity, and functions aesthetically in a variety of media. In the context of the waning of a neoclassically idealized antiquity, Fitzgerald describes the new contents produced by its asymptotic approach to meaninglessness, and how the antiquity that it imagined both is and is not with us.

While the history of the non-violent Civil Rights Movement, from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, is one of the great American stories of the twentieth century, the related Black Power movement has taken a more complex path through the nation's history. Formed by a multitude of individuals, the long history of the Black Power movement stretches before and beyond its political manifestations. Beginning with the folk-narratives told on the plantation, Black Power and the American People charts a course through the iconoclasm of the Harlem Renaissance, the battleground of the American campus, the struggle and skill of the Negro Leagues, the drama of the boxing ring, the killing fields of Vietnam and the cold concrete of the penitentiary, right up to the Black Lives Matter movement of the present day. Tracing these connected cultural expressions through time, Black Power and the American People explores the profound legacy of Black Power from its earliest roots to its most futuristic manifestations, its long history in American culture and its profound influence on the American imagination.

By what means did so much beauty and ingenuity appears in articles of everyday rural life in Portugal? How did the shape of these objects balance necessity and formal perfection so skillfully? This book explores the effect that generations of trial and error, individual craftsmanship, and an instinct to carve out the essential with the slenderest of means brought to objects that made life both livable and meaningful to a pre-industrial society. The objects photographed and described by designer Jasper Morrison may be appreciated both for their beauty and for the example they set of design at its purest.

Richard Wilson was born in London in 1953. Descended on one side from a line of builders and on the other of artists, his work often comes closer to engineering or even architecture than it does to traditional sculpture. Typically he transforms the viewer's environment into something unsettling and strange by the interventions he makes, whether in the internal space of a gallery, the structure of a building or in one of the ships with which he has a particular affinity. Perhaps his best-known work is 20:50, currently on show at, and probably the most popular exhibit in, the Saatchi Gallery in London. For 20:50, Wilson flooded a gallery space with oil, which has a highly reflective surface. Into the oil is built a kind of narrow pier or promenade down which one person at a time can walk, the oil perilously close to their body. So reflective is the oil that the room induces a strong sense of disorientation. Further along the River Thames, next to the Millennium Dome, is another Wilson piece that provides an unexpected sight. The skeletal ship A Slice of Reality, its sides removed and with the tides moving freely through it, is both a startling sculptural object in its own right and a comment on the vanished shipping industry that was once a mainstay of the river community. In Los Angeles, Wilson was inspired by one of the most ubiquitous symbols of Californian life, the swimming pool, suspending a fibreglass pool shell from a sixty foot-long pipe in MOCA's subterranean gallery (Deep End). In addition to and often in conjunction with these large-scale projects, Wilson makes films and sculpture, takes photographs and stages performance events and has been a formative influence on a generation of British artists. This lavishly illustrated career survey includes a new interview with Wilson and examines six key works in depth.

Conceptual art consisted of a loose collection of related practices that emerged worldwide during the 1960s and 1970s. This collection of essays offers readers a wealth of new research on the earliest international exhibitions of Conceptual art; new interpretations of some of its most important practitioners; and a reconsideration of the relationship between Conceptual art and the intellectual and social context of the 1960s and 1970s. Of special note are the contributions that focus on the explicitly social and political aspirations of this influential avant-garde artistic practice.

Tsion Avital poses the question: "Is modern art--art at all?" He argues that the nonrepresentational art produced in the twentieth century was not actually art, but rather the debris of the visual tradition it replaced. Modern art has thrived on the state of total confusion existing 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.

One of the most prolific and influential artists of the 20th century, Jean Dubuffet has featured in a multitude of exhibitions and catalogues. Yet his work remains some of the most misunderstood—and least interrogated—post-war French art. In Jean Dubuffet, Bricoleur: Portraits, Pastiche, Performativity, Stephanie Chadwick re-examines his portraits (a veritable who’s who of the Parisian art and intellectual scene) through the lens of his writings and in tandem with the art and literature of his Surrealist sitters. Dubuffet, while posing as an outsider himself, mingled with many great artists and theorists. He also celebrated Art Brut (the art of ostensible outsiders), developing an elaborate and nuanced stream of conceptual resources to reconfigure painting and reframe post-war anticultural discourses. This book investigates Dubuffet’s painting as bricolage, uncovering his reliance on a culture of anticulture and the appropriation of motifs from Surrealism to the South Pacific, to explore themes of multivalence, performativity, and multifaceted identity in his portraits.

This study examines the origins, development and explosion of biographical literature on artists in Britain between 1870 and 1910. It analyzes a variety of narrative modes, including gossip, anecdotes, and serialization, as well as the differences among genres (autobiographies, family biographies, biographical histories and dictionaries.) Julie Codell discerns the multiple, often conflicting identities that were ascribed to artists collectively, and as individuals. Her book serves as a timely sociological and cultural overview of the art world in Britain in the decades before World War I.

The studio and residential building at Wuhrstrasse 8/10 in Zurich is a unique place: Commissioned by the Painters & Sculptors Cooperative Zurich, founded in 1948, eminent Swiss architect Ernst Gisel (1922–2021) designed this ensemble of buildings comprising 8 apartments and twelve artist studios in 1953. Thus, a utopia of self-organised working and living space became reality. Since then, 54 artists have left their mark on the artistic and cultural life of Zurich and Switzerland from their home on Wuhrstrasse 8/10. This book recounts the history of this extraordinary structure, illustrated with archival plans and documents as well as new and historic photographs. It also examines the political and social dimension of the Wuhrstrasse model and its international impact. Further essays explore how the lives and works of the resident artists are interwoven with contemporary events, and address the artist studio as both an idealised myth and as a real place of work. In inserts created especially for the book, eleven Zurich-based artists, all members of the cooperative themselves, respond to the exemplary model that is the “Atelierhaus.”

Mark Dion (b.1961) is an American artist who, in making his art, metamorphoses into explorer, biochemist, detective and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments and museum caches of the great historical naturalists - following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes that combine taxidermic animals with lab equipment artefacts, like walk-through Wunderkammers and life-sized cabinets of curiosity. Lias Graziose Corrin, Director of the Williams College Museum of Art, surveys Dion's most significant works and his ongoing investigations into natural history's obsession with categorizing nature. Critic and theorist Miwon Kwon talks to the artist about the interface between ecology and culture and the phenomenon of site-specific art. Norman Bryson, Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, makes an iconographical analysis of The Library for the Birds of Antwerp, an indoor sculpture Dion constructed for 18 live African finches in 1993. The artist has selected a text by novelist Jon Berger, one of the first post-war thinkers to analyze the position of animals in a capitalist society. The book also features Dion's own provocative, witty and often lyrical writing on nature and his role as an artist engaged in environmental issues.