American artist Nancy Spero (b.1929) concentrates on the depiction of women: mythological women, movie women, tortured women. Inspired by classical and modern sources, she collages and imprints her contemporary goddesses on to long, papyrus-like friezes that scroll around museum walls. Her subject matter, which has ranged from the writings of Artaud to the Vietnam War, mirrors her life. Working in Paris in the cultural ferment of the 1960s, she moved to New York in the 1970s to co-establish the feminist gallery A.I.R. and to join with artists and critics such as Leon Golub, Robert Morris and Lucy R Lippard in forming the Art Workers' Coalition. Since the 1980s she has attracted international acclaim, her exquisite works giving form to feminist issues and new critical discourses. The Survey by Jon Bird, cultural theorist and curator of the first British retrospective of Spero's work, discusses developments in her practice since the 1950s. Contemporary art scholar and critic Jo Anna Isaak talks with the artist about her life and work. Art historian Sylvere Lotringer, Edtior of Semiotext(e) and author of Overexposed, focuses on her 1993 installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In recognition of the impact Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove made on her, Spero has chosen a scene from the screenplay; key excerpts from Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity by feminist theorist Alice Jardine on the place of women in a patriarchal culture complete the Artist's Choice section. Also included are a selection of Spero's own writings, many published here for the first time.

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.

Edward Ardizzone RA (1900-79) was one of relatively few British artists who defined the field of illustration for their generation. Although his work as an artist and illustrator was wide-ranging, it is for his illustrated children's books, almost continuously available since they were first published from the late 1930s onwards, that he is best known. This book provides the first fully illustrated survey of Ardizzone's work, analysing his activity as an artist and illustrator in the context of 20th-century British art, illustration, printing and publishing. Copiously illustrated with many previously unpublished images, Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator also contributes more broadly to the current reassessment and investigation of mid-20th-century British art and illustration. Alan Powers (author of the bestselling Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer) has written a critically considered text which draws for the first time on the family's archives, those of Ardizzone's publishers, and conversations with those who knew the artist. This beautiful and enlightening book, which reflects in its design and production values the aesthetic of an artist who was closely involved in the production of his own illustrated books, will be a fascinating read both for specialists as well as for readers who have grown up with the unforgettable characters of Ardizzone's classic children's stories.

The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construct, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Offering a much-needed corrective to this critique, Michael Lucken demonstrates the distinct character of Japanese mimesis and its dynamic impact on global culture, showing through several twentieth-century masterpieces the generative and regenerative power of Japanese arts. Choosing a representative work from each of four modern genres-painting, film, photography, and animation-Lucken portrays the range of strategies that Japanese artists use to re-present contemporary influences. He examines Kishida Ryusei's portraits of Reiko (1914-1929), Kurosawa Akira's Ikiru (1952), Araki Nobuyoshi's photographic novel Sentimental Journey-Winter (1991), and Miyazaki Hayao's popular anime film Spirited Away (2001), revealing the sophisticated patterns of mimesis that are unique but not exclusive to modern Japanese art. In doing so, Lucken identifies the tensions that drive the Japanese imagination, which are much richer than a simple opposition between progress and tradition, and their reflection of human culture's universal encounter with change. This global perspective explains why, despite its non-Western origins, Japanese art has earned such a vast following.

A philosophical consideration of Soviet Socialism that reveals the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporary anticapitalist discourse and theory This book, a philosophical consideration of Soviet socialism, is not meant simply to revisit the communist past; its aim, rather, is to witness certain zones where capitalism's domination is resisted-the zones of countercapitalist critique, civil society agencies, and theoretical provisions of emancipation or progress-and to inquire to what extent those zones are in fact permeated by unconscious capitalism and thus unwittingly affirm the capitalist condition. By means of the philosophical and politico-economical consideration of Soviet socialism of the 1960 and 1970s, this book manages to reveal the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporaneous anticapitalist discourse and theory. The research is marked by a broad cross-disciplinary approach based on political economy, philosophy, art theory, and cultural theory that redefines old Cold War and Slavic studies' views of the post-Stalinist years, as well as challenges the interpretations of this period of historical socialism in Western Marxist thought.

An insightful study of the progressive politics animating a great work of modernist mural painting In 1936 the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project commissioned Stuart Davis (1892-1964) to paint a mural for the Williamsburg Houses, a New York City housing project. Though the mural, Swing Landscape, was never installed in its intended location, it survives as an impressive testament to Davis's energetic, colorful brand of abstraction and the progressive politics that animated it. This study explores the painting, one of the greatest of twentieth-century America and arguably Davis's most ambitious work. This book challenges the prevailing tendency to separate Davis's leftist activism from his art and contextualizes Swing Landscape within 1930s abstract mural painting in New York, emphasizing the politics of abstraction. The book also offers the first comprehensive look at the Williamsburg mural commission, including works by Willem de Kooning, Ilya Bolotowsky, and others. The result is an indispensable resource on interwar modernism, mural painting, and urban development.

"Beginning with the arts produced in the Colonial period, Dr. Lewis documents and interprets the flow of creative productions of an important segment of the American population. Her book shows that the range of art produced by African American artists covers the entire spectrum of craft productions through painting, sculpture, and printmaking. There is a progressive development of style that not only reflects the trends in particular periods, but reveals an evolving pattern of indigenous qualities that are distinct. The art community in general and the African American community in particular are fortunate to have Dr. Samella Lewis, for she has developed unusual authority in the area of African American art. I know that "African American Art and Artists "will be of great value educationally and that it will offer a stimulating and rewarding experience to all who have the opportunity to share in its contents."--Jacob Lawrence

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.

Combining a highly expressive graphic style and a deep sensitivity to colour, Ernst Wilhelm Nay's intense painting is surveyed in this first English-language overview of his varied life and career. For Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-68), painting was an entrance to a world beyond the visible, a world more real and more vital that lay beneath the surface of appearances. Beginning his career as the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic became the dark years of the Third Reich, it was natural that he should look to art for an alternative reality. One of Germany's most important abstract painters, this fully illustrated publication offers a fresh approach to the Nay's work. This comprehensive monograph is accompanied by an overview of his life and work by John-Paul Stonard and in-depth history of Nay's reception in Britain and the United States by Dr Pamela Kort, and a foreword by Sir Norman Rosenthal.

The first extensive monograph dedicated to the work of Paolo Ventura (Milan, 1968). Ventura has established himself in the field of artistic photography, offering a singular and absolutely original interpretation of staged photography, an art form in which photography is the final product of a creative process which, in his case, involves the preparation of scenarios and mannequins: the latter, together with real characters among which the artist himself often appears, are the protagonists of his stories. In these three-dimensional settings Ventura recreates, and then fixes through photography, a mental space that refers to the atmosphere of “magical realism” and to the fairytale flavour of childhood, generating a deliberately surreal contrast with the depth of some topics involved (such as war, abandonment, memory, identity). The volume offers an overall look at the artist’s 15 years of activity, showcasing 21 series from 2005 to the present time, highlighting the evolution of his language which, in addition to photography, is also expressed through drawings. The monograph includes critical texts by Walter Guadagnini and Francine Prose, an interview with Ventura by Monica Poggi and biographical notes. Text in English and Italian.

An unparalleled reassessment of Pierre Bonnard, exploring his paintings, drawings, photography, and prints As one of the founders of the post-Impressionist group the Nabis, French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) is frequently seen as a transitional figure between the Impressionists and modernists. This beautifully illustrated book offers a fresh interpretation, revealing the artist's central concern with expanding representation beyond the limits of natural vision. The result is a new understanding not only of Bonnard but of modernism itself. Exploring how Bonnard's dazzling domestic scenes and landscapes reimagine perception, embodiment, and the passage of time, Lucy Whelan characterizes him as a painter of unusual insight in his consideration of the relationship between vision and representation. The book covers Bonnard's paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints, with special focus on his later works from the 1920s to his death in 1947, and draws on an in-depth study of the artist's diaries, interviews, and other written sources. A groundbreaking reassessment, Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision presents an artist engaged in avant-garde forms of experimentation who complicated vision in innovative ways.

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch's painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer. Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a brilliant and personal examination of the legacy of one of the world's most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself.

Since it was first published in 1992, this book has become one of the leading anthologies of art theoretical texts in the English-speaking world. This expanded edition includes the best recent reflections, taking the anthology up to the turn of the 21st century. The book offers comprehensive representation of the theories which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the 20th century. As well as writings by artists, the anthology includes texts by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures. The content is clearly structured into eight broadly chronological sections, starting from the legacy of symbolism at the beginning of the century and concluding with contemporary debates about postmodernism. The editors provide introductions to all of the more than 300 texts, placing theories and critical approaches in context.

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.

From abolitionist medallions to statues of bondspeople bearing broken chains, sculpture gave visual and material form to narratives about the end of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery sheds light on the complex-and at times contradictory-place of such works as they moved through a world contoured both by the devastating economy of enslavement and by international abolitionist campaigns. By examining matters of making, circulation, display, and reception, Caitlin Meehye Beach argues that sculpture stood as a highly visible but deeply unstable site from which to interrogate the politics of slavery. With focus on works by Josiah Wedgwood, Hiram Powers, Edmonia Lewis, John Bell, and Francesco Pezzicar, Beach uncovers both the radical possibilities and the conflicting limitations of art in the pursuit of justice in racial capitalism's wake.

This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists' experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies-whether realized or not-still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those who do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is "wrong" with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.

The paintings and architecture by the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser are nothing less than revolutionary with respect to nature and individual creativity. His work is not about silent conformity, but about life itself: each individual, in society and in the environment. With their strong, colorful formal vocabulary, Hundertwasser's works allow nature its space. Even beyond his artwork, though, the Austrian environmentalist fought for new ideas and ideals. In many conversations, lectures, letters, and manifestos, he formulated his notions-from recycling, the greening of roofs and facades, and the democratization of living space-in order to lend them weight. What seemed like a utopia to his contemporaries is now urgently virulent and surprisingly current. Commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Hundertwasser's death, this attractive book compiles his statements, excerpts from his manifestos, his paintings, examples of his utopian architecture, and his ideas for the future.

Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In this text, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by mid-century, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary. Drucker suggests a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists, based on a re-reading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara.

A comprehensive survey of the work of the legendary Swiss artist, this book illustrates and examines more than 100 of his sculptures, paintings, drawings, and prints This lavishly illustrated retrospective traces the early and midcareer development of the preeminent Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), examining the emergence of his distinct figural style through works including a series of walking men, elongated standing women, and numerous busts. Rare paintings and drawings from his formative period show the significance of landscape in Giacometti's work, while also revealing the influence of the postimpressionist painters that surrounded his father, the artist Giovanni Giacometti. Other areas of inquiry on which Alberto Giacometti casts new light are his studio practice-amply illustrated with photographs-his obsessive focus on depicting the human head, his collaborations with poets and writers, and his development of the walking man sculpture, thanks to numerous drawings, many of which have never been shown. Original essays by modern art and Giacometti specialists shed new light on era-defining sculptural masterpieces, including the Walking Man, the Nose, and the Chariot, or on key aspects of his work, such as the significance of surrealism, his drawing practice, or the question of space. Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art (March 12-June 12, 2022) Seattle Art Museum (July 14-October 9, 2022) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (November 13, 2022-February 12, 2023) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (March 19-June 18, 2023)

In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself.

These critical, theoretical, and personal essays serve as a guide to developments in nonmainstream media art during the past ten years -- sexual representation debates, documentary ethics, the shift from analog to digital media, a new social obsession with smell. Marks takes up well-known artists like experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and mysterious animators the Brothers Quay, and introduces groundbreaking, lesser-known film, video, and digital artists.

From this emerges a materialist theory -- an embodied, erotic relationship to art and to the world. Marks's approach leads to an appreciation of the works' mortal bodies: film's volatile emulsion, video's fragile magnetic base, crash-prone Net art; it also offers a productive alternative to the popular understanding of digital media as "virtual" and immaterial. Weaving a continuous fabric from philosophy, fiction, science, dreams, and intimate experience, Touch opens a new world of art media to readers.

This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism that first emerged in late nineteenth-century Germany and remained influential throughout the inter-war years and beyond. Its supporters saw themselves as a new elite, ideally placed to tackle the many challenges facing the young and rapidly industrializing German nation-state. They defined themselves as bourgeois, and acted as self-appointed champions of a modern consciousness. Focusing on figures such as Hermann Muthesius, Fritz Schumacher, and Karl-Ernst Osthaus, and the activities of the Deutscher Werkbund and other networks of bourgeois designers, writers, and 'experts', this book shows how bourgeois modernism shaped the infrastructure of social and political life in early twentieth-century Germany.
Bourgeois modernism exercised its power not so much in the realm of ideas, but by transforming the physical environment of German cities, from domestic interiors, via consumer objects, to urban and regional planning. Drawing on a detailed analysis of key material sites of bourgeois modernism, and interpreting them in conjunction with written sources, this study offers new insights into the history of the bourgeois mindset and its operations in the private and public realms. Thematic chapters examine leitmotifs such as the sense of locality and place, the sense of history and time, and the sense of nature and culture. Yet for all its self-conscious progressivism, German bourgeois modernism was not an inevitable precursor of neo-liberal global capitalism. It remained a hotly contested historical construct, which was constantly re-defined in different geographical and political settings.

Looking behind the scenes at the personalities and policies of such venerable institutions as the Federal Arts Project and the Museum of Modern Art, A. Joan Saab discerns a broad-based democratic modernism inspired by and engaged with the social life of the period.In the summer of 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Arts Project under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. The project's goal was, in the words of its director Holger Cahill, to "get people all over the United States interested in art as an everyday part of living and working." In addition to this endeavor, the project would also provide work for artists who, as a project press release stated, "had been hit just as hard by unemployment as any other producing worker." Meanwhile, as director of the newly opened Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr was instituting his philosophy of "democracy in design" through a series of ambitious exhibits that focused on informed consumption in the marketplace.The idea of treating the artist as a "producing worker" and art as an "everyday part of living and working" was a novel one in 1935 and illustrated a broad shift in the social roles of both. Prior to the 1930s, art in America had resided principally in the domain of the cultural elite. The upheaval of the Depression era, however, challenged this authority. Throughout the decade, government officials, museum professionals, educators, and artists worked together to determine not only what role artists would play in society but also what forms democratic art would take and how widely it would be disseminated, thus fundamentally redefining the relationship between art and society. This egalitarian artistic movement of the 1930s stands as a significant moment in the ongoing dialogue over the relationship of art and public life that continues today.

The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this groundbreaking collection explores the more allusive - and elusive - references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists.
There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom.
With numerous illustrations both in the book and on its companion website, The Hearing Eye reaffirms the significance of a fascinating and dynamic aspect of African American visual art that has been too long neglected.