This book is focused on the transcultural memory of the Mediterranean region and the different ways it is articulated by contemporary art practices and museum projects linked to migrations, exile, diaspora and transnationality. The artistic and curatorial examples analysed in this study articulate a critical relationship between the cultural representations and the sense of heritage, property and belonging, offering the opportunity of a more problematic and stimulating vision of the preservation of the European arts, traditions and histories. Artists and projects examined include the project Porto M in Lampedusa, Zineb Sedira, Ursula Biemann, Lara Baladi, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir, Kader Attia and Walid Raad.

Numerous contemporary artists, particularly female artists, have chosen to examine the idealization of the female body. In this crucial book, Emily L. Newman focuses on a number of key themes including obesity, anorexia, bulimia, dieting, self-harm, and female body image. Many artists utilize their own bodies in their work, and in the act of trying to critique the diet industry, they also often become complicit, as they strive to lose weight themselves. Making art and engaging eating disorder communities (in real life and online) often work to perpetuate the illnesses of themselves or others. A core group of artists has worked to show bodies that are outside the norm, paralleling the rise of fat activism in the 1990s and 2000s. Interwoven throughout this inclusive study are related interdisciplinary concerns including sociology, popular culture, and feminism.

Barely a decade passed from the Wright Brothers' first powered flight to aircraft becoming lethal instruments of war. The Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service took off in the very early days of The Great War and captured the public's imagination and admiration. Sydney and Richard Carline happened to be both pilots and artists as was Frenchman Henri Farre. Their works inspired celebrated painters like Sir John Lavery who took to the skies in an airship in the First World War. Feeding on the demand for works depicting this new dimension of warfighting, a new genre of art was born which has remained popular ever since. During the Second World War, the paintings of Paul Nash stood out as did Eric Ravilions who, ironically, died in an air crash. War artist Albert Richards dropped with British paratroopers on D-Day. Post-war, paintings by leading British and international artists graphically illustrate conflicts such as the Falklands, Bosnia and the Gulf War. John Fairley has brought together a dazzling collection of art works covering over 100 years of air warfare, enhanced by lively and informative text. The result is a book that is visually and historically satisfying.

Published to document Gagosian Gallery's 2015 Balthus exhibition in Paris, this striking new book depicts the beautiful paintings, drawings, and photographs that were part of that career-spanning exhibition, the first of Balthus's work in Paris since the 1983-84 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Vibrant color reproductions of the artist's interior portraits, street scenes, and landscapes, along with striking installation shots, present the self-taught classicism that Balthus cultivated as a framework for his more enigmatic artistic investigations. A conversation between Olivier Zahm and Setsuko Klossowska de Rola completes the catalogue, providing an insightful look into the world of this reclusive painter of charged and disquieting narrative scenes.

Matthew Baigell examines the work of Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, Frank Stella, and other artists, relating their art works to the social contexts in which they were created. Identifying important and recurring themes in this body of art, such as the persistence of Emersonian values, the search for national and regional identity, and aspects of alienation, he also explores the personal and religious identities of artists as revealed in their works. Collectively, Baigell's work demonstrates the importance of America as the defining element in American art.

Victoria Crowe is one of the world's most vital and original figurative painters. Her instantly recognisable work is represented in a large number of public and private collections. This extensively illustrated new book looks in depth at some of her own favourite portraiture. Looking at the psychology of her subjects and of herself in painting them, this is a fascinating book. Whether you are intrigued by the enigmatic stare of a psychiatrist, struck by the haunted eyes of an Auschwitz survivor or curious about the meaningful surroundings of her own self-portrait, this is an absorbing and enthralling read. Victoria Crowe lives in Scotland and Venice.

Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Andy Warhol each significantly shaped the development of art in the twentieth century. These Modern masters are the subjects of four small books, the first volumes in a series featuring important artists in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Each book presents a single artist and guides readers through a dozen of his most memorable achievements. Works are reproduced in color and accompanied by informative and accessible short essays that provide background on the artworks and on the artist himself, illuminating technique, style, subject matter and significance. Written by Carolyn Lanchner, former curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum, these books are excellent resources for readers interested in the stories behind masterpieces of the Modern canon and for those who wish to understand the contributions of individual artists to the history of Modern art. This volume focuses on Matisse.

As the lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Quetzal and a scholar of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, Martha Gonzalez is uniquely positioned to articulate the ways in which creative expression can serve the dual roles of political commentary and community building. Drawing on postcolonial, Chicana, black feminist, and performance theories, Chican@ Artivistas explores the visual, musical, and performance art produced in East Los Angeles since the inception of NAFTA and the subsequent anti-immigration rhetoric of the 1990s. Showcasing the social impact made by key artist-activists on their communities and on the mainstream art world and music industry, Gonzalez charts the evolution of a now-canonical body of work that took its inspiration from the Zapatista movement, particularly its masked indigenous participants, and that responded to efforts to impose systems of labor exploitation and social subjugation. Incorporating Gonzalez's memories of the Mexican nationalist music of her childhood and her band's journey to Chiapas, the book captures the mobilizing music, poetry, dance, and art that emerged in pre-gentrification corners of downtown Los Angeles and that went on to inspire flourishing networks of bold, innovative artivistas.

In the tradition of Persepolis, In the Shadow of No Towers, and Our Cancer Year, an illustrated memoir of remarkable depth, power, and beauty Danny Gregory and his wife, Patti, hadn't been married long. Their baby, Jack, was ten months old; life was pretty swell. And then Patti fell under a subway train and was paralyzed from the waist down. In a world where nothing seemed to have much meaning, Danny decided to teach himself to draw, and what he learned stunned him. Suddenly things had color again, and value. The result is Everyday Matters, his journal of discovery, recovery, and daily life in New York City. It is as funny, insightful, and surprising as life itself.

Chinese art has experienced its most profound metamorphosis since the early 1950s, transforming from humble realism to socialist realism, from revolutionary art to critical realism, then avant-garde movement, and globalized Chinese art. With a hybrid mix of Chinese philosophy, imported but revised Marxist ideology, and western humanities, Chinese artists have created an alternative approach - after a great ideological and aesthetic transition in the 1980s - toward its own contemporaneity though interacting and intertwining with the art of rest of the world. This book will investigate, from the perspective of an activist, critic, and historian who grew up prior to and participated in the great transition, and then researched and taught the subject, the evolution of Chinese art in modern and contemporary times. The volume will be a comprehensive and insightful history of the one of the most sophisticated and unparalleled artistic and cultural phenomena in the modern world.

Public space is political space. When a work of public art is put up or taken down, it is an inherently political statement, and the work's aesthetics are inextricably entwined with its political valences. Democracy's openness allows public art to explore its values critically and to suggest new ones. However, it also facilitates artworks that can surreptitiously or fortuitously undermine democratic values. Today, as bigotry and authoritarianism are on the rise and democratic movements seek to combat them, as Confederate monuments fall and sculptures celebrating diversity rise, the struggle over the values enshrined in the public arena has taken on a new urgency. In this book, Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society. Through close considerations of Chicago's Millennium Park and New York's National September 11 Memorial, Evans shows how a wide range of artworks participate in democratic dialogues. A nuanced consideration of contemporary art, aesthetics, and political theory, this book is a timely and rigorous elucidation of how thoughtful public art can contribute to the flourishing of a democratic way of life.

Following a spectacular surge in interest for Egyptian masters, Modern Art in Egypt fills the void in Egyptian art history, chronicling the lives and legacies of six pioneering artists working under the British occupation. Using Western-style academic art as a starting point, these artists championed cultural progress, re-appropriating Egyptian visual culture from European orientalists to found a neo-Pharaonic School of Realism. Modern Art in Egypt charts the years from Muhammad Ali's educational reforms to the mass influx of foreigners during the nineteenth-century. With a focus on the al-Nahda thought movement, this book provides an overview of the key policy-makers, reformists and feminists who founded the first School of Fine Arts in Egypt, as well as cultural salons, museums and arts collectives. By combining political and aesthetic histories, Fatenn Mostafa breaks the prevailing understanding that has preferred to see non-Western art as derivatives of Western art movements. Modern Art in Egypt re-establishes Egypt's presence within the global Modernist canon.

This work examines the evolution of Dali's art during the 1920s and 30s, when he was associated, first with the Catalan avant-garde, and then with the Surrealist group in Paris. During this period, Dali's painting style changed radically, a phenomenon which has never been fully accounted for in the extensive literature on this subject. Haim Finkelstein demonstrates that Dali's writings, in which he explicated theoretical systems such as Paranoia-Criticism and other ideas adopted from Freud, were important for the active and critical role that they played in his development as an artist and often controversial figure. His study is the first to examine these writings in detail as the foundation for the evolution of Dali's artistic vision.

The Present Prospects of Social Art History represents a major reconsideration of how art historians analyze works of art and the role that historical factors, both those at the moment when the work was created and when the historian addresses the objects at hand, play in informing their interpretations. Featuring the work of some of the discipline's leading scholars, the volume contains a collection of essays that consider the advantages, limitations, and specific challenges of seeing works of art primarily through a historical perspective. The assembled texts, along with an introduction by the co-editors, demonstrate an array of possible methodological approaches that acknowledge the crucial role of history in the creation, reception, and exhibition of works of art.

Now available in paperback, this is the first work in English to tell the full story of Claude Cahun’s art and life. It both recounts her life and analyses her complex writings and images, making them available to a wide audience. Shaw’s account embeds Cahun’s work in the exciting milieu of Paris between the wars and follows it into the dangerous territory of the Nazi-occupied Isle of Jersey. Using letters and diaries, Shaw brings Cahun’s ideas and feelings to life and contributes to our understanding of photography, Surrealism and the histories of women artists and queer culture. This book includes a full range of illustrations by Cahun and other renowned photographers, as well as writings never before translated into English. Shaw’s book will appeal to art and photography lovers and scholars alike.

This vibrant history of the former German Democratic Republic's public art reveals a barely known but visually and theoretically rich cultural legacy. Picturing Socialism shows how works of art and design in the urban spaces of East Germany were the site of a sustained struggle between practitioners, critics and political leaders. This was not the oft-assumed conflict between artistic freedom and political dogma; at stake was the self-identity of the republic as socialist. Art and its relationship to architecture functioned as the testing ground for East Germany's relationship to socialist realism and modernism against the backdrop of Cold War competition from the neighbouring Federal Republic. Picturing Socialism makes a timely contribution to the recent groundswell of interest in the legacy of East Germany's art and architecture, illuminating and elucidating the public art which has been lost or remains under threat since unification in 1990.

`I'm for mechanical art', said Andy Warhol (1928-1987). `When I took up silkscreening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through commercial techniques of multiple reproduction.' Printmaking was a vital artistic practice for Andy Warhol. Prints figure prominently throughout his career from his earliest work as a commercial illustrator in the 1950s, to the collaborative silkscreens made in the Factory during the 1960s and the commissioned portfolios of his final years. In their fascination with popular culture and provocative subverting of the difference between original and copy, Warhol's prints are recognized now as a prescient forerunner of today's hypersophisticated, hyper-saturated and hyper-accelerated visual culture. Andy Warhol Prints, published to accompany a major exhibition at the Portland Art Museum - the largest of its kind ever to be presented - includes approximately 250 of Warhol's prints and ephemera from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer, including iconic silkscreen prints of Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. Organized chronologically and by series, Andy Warhol Prints establishes the range of Warhol's innovative graphic production as it evolved over the course of four decades, with a particular focus on Warhol's use of different printmaking techniques, beginning with illustrated books and ending with screen printing.

This lavishly illustrated book explores the aesthetic and cultural impact of New Mexico art from the 1880s to the present, and highlights a refreshing range of works representing European, native, ethnic, tourist, regional and commercial art. For the past 125 years, art in New Mexico has told a complex story of aesthetic interaction and cultural fusion. Southwest art began with 19th-century documentarians confronting a disappearing Native America and an exotic landscape. Artists who arrived in New Mexico beginning in the 1880s wrestled with the commercialisation of the region and the clash of cultural identities. Native peoples and expedition photographers, tourism and the railroad, artist colonies, the arrival of modernism, Trinity and the end of romanticism, a new generation of native artists challenging ethnic identity -- all have played a part in what we now call New Mexican art. "The Art of New Mexico" provides new perspectives on the evolution of art in the state, and highlights the outstanding collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, which is the repository for some of the finest works by renowned artists such as Adam Clark Vroman, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Luis Elijo Tapia. Curator and author Joseph Traugott discusses how Native American and Hispanic artists of the Southwest not only influenced the non-native artists who came to call New Mexico home, but how in turn their work was influenced by these newcomers. By organising key objects from the museum's collection with an intercultural history of New Mexico art, the book makes cogent connections between specific works, aesthetic movements, and cultural traditions. As a result, this book will engage readers who are well versed in the artistic traditions of New Mexico, as well as those new to its aesthetic heritage. The book is published to coincide with a reinstallation of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.

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.

The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist examines the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic premises for avant-garde art and its subsequent evolution and corruption in the late twentieth century. Arguing that modernist art is essentially therapeutic in intention, both towards self and society, Donald Kuspit further posits that neo-avant-garde, or post-modern art, at once mocks and denies the possibility of therapeutic change. As such, it accommodates the status quo of capitalist society, in which fame and fortune are valued above anything else. Stripping avant-garde art of its missionary, therapeutic intention, neo-avant-garde art instead converts it into a cliche of creative novelty or ironical value for its fashionable look. Moreover, it destroys the precarious balance of artistic narcissism and social empathy that characterizes modern art, tilting it cynically towards the former. Incorporating psychoanalytic ideas, particularly those concerned with narcissism, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist offers a reinterpretation of modern art history. Donald Kuspit, one of America's foremost art critics, is a contributing editor to Artforum and the author of many books.