Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for best biography or critical book related to crime fiction! A lavish full-colour celebration of the 2000 books by more than 250 authors published by the iconic Crime Club between 1930 and 1994. The Hooded Gunman was the sinister figure who, having appeared in various guises on the covers of Collins' various series of Mystery and Detective books in the 1920s, finally gained recognition with the launch of Collins' Crime Club, becoming the definitive imprint stamp on more than 2,000 books published by that august imprint between 1930 and 1994. From Agatha Christie to Reginald Hill, the Hooded Gunman was a guarantee of a first-class crime novel for almost 65 years, and those books are now as sought after and collectable and almost any other book series, with many commanding high prices and almost impossible to find. In the year that Collins - the publisher founded by William Collins in Glasgow in 1819 - is enjoying its 200th birthday, this book celebrates probably its most famous publishing imprint. Written and researched by Agatha Christie writer, expert and archivist Dr John Curran, this sumptuous coffee table book looks back at the history of the Crime Club and its authors, showing the jackets of every book published by the imprint over seven decades, and the descriptive 'blurbs' of every book, running to more than 350,000 words. With facts, figures and lists, and drawing on rare archival photos, correspondence and marketing materials, it is the first time that anyone has attempted to chronicle the publishing of the Crime Club - the ultimate book for fans of crime fiction and also of twentieth century book jacket design. The Hooded Gunman won the H.R.F. Keating Award for best 2019 biography or critical book related to crime fiction, and was also nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

In this expansive study, John Clark draws on decades of his research on modern art cultures across Asia from 1850 to the present day. The Asian Modern uses an artist-centric approach, by way of meticulous case studies, to create a new comparative paradigm for the narration of art. “Affiliations of place,” claims John Clark, rather than “genealogies of time,” is key to clarifying the category of “the Asian Modern.” [...] The transfer is from an extractive art history obsessed with pedigree and derivations, on the one hand, to a redistributive art history, on the other, that is possible only through the reciprocities and fundamental obligations between persons and things. Absent the latter, there can be no future for art history in Asia. —Patrick D. Flores, Professor of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, introduction to The Asian Modern

Mythologized as the era of the "good war" and the "Greatest Generation," the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment. Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art's ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson's capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.

The Soviet Union has left a vast heritage in interior design that is largely unknown in the West. Other than architecture and graphic or product design, interior design from the Soviet era has not yet been thoroughly investigated. For the first time ever, this book offers a comprehensive survey of the country's interior design culture between revolutionary avant-garde and late Soviet modernism. Drawing on archives that were inaccessible until recently and featuring a wealth of previously unpublished material, it documents the achievements of seven decades in the former socialist empire. Soviet design is often discredited as massive, non-ergonomic and monotonous. Yet a remarkable variety of original styles have emerged behind the iron curtain. The 1920s were marked by bold exploration and experiments at Vkhutemas and by constructivism, rationalism, and suprematism. Early in Stalin's reign constructivism was heavily criticised and post-constructivism and Soviet neo-classicism appeared alongside what became known as 'agitational furniture', inspired by the regime's propaganda. The 1930s brought Soviet Art Deco and eventually Stalinist Empire, which has produced some of the Soviet Union's most iconic buildings. In the late 1950s, after Stalin's death, the last Soviet 'big style' originated modernist and functionalist furniture, mass-produced to fit the small apartments in the Khrushchyovka multi-unit housing developments that were built in cities on a large scale. The 1960s mark the Golden Age of Soviet interior design, showing again influences by the early Soviet Avant-Garde and the Bauhaus, while most of the visionary work of a new generation of designers in the 1970s and 1980s remained unrealised.

Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa's cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany. The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German colonialism by contemporary artists today. This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.

Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886-1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists' representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book examines artworks by Walter Osborne, Rose Barton, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons and Flora Mitchell, encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is already renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate the many attractions it held for Ireland's artists, offering a vivid visualisation of the city's streets and inhabitants at a crucial time in its history. -- .

A timely reexamination of the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17, focusing on the women whose work defied gender norms through novel aesthetic forms and techniques In this important book Christina Weyl takes us into the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17 and highlights the women whose work there advanced both modernism and feminism in the 1940s and 1950s. Weyl focuses on eight artists-Louise Bourgeois, Minna Citron, Worden Day, Dorothy Dehner, Sue Fuller, Alice Trumbull Mason, Louise Nevelson, and Anne Ryan-who bent the technical rules of printmaking and blazed new aesthetic terrain with their etchings, engravings, and woodcuts. She reveals how Atelier 17 operated as an uncommonly egalitarian laboratory for revolutionizing print technique, style, and scale. It facilitated women artists' engagement with modernist styles, providing a forum for extraordinary achievements that shaped postwar sculpture, fiber art, neo-Dadaism, and the Pattern and Decoration movement. Atelier 17 fostered solidarity among women pursuing modernist forms of expression, providing inspiration for feminist collective action in the 1960s and 1970s. The Women of Atelier 17 also identifies for the first time nearly 100 women, many previously unknown, who worked at the studio, and provides incisive illustrated biographies of selected artists.

The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections. The editors invite the submission of articles in these fields and welcome discussion of in-progress projects. -- .

Sverre Bjertnaes was higly influenced by realistic painter Odd Nerdrum, although he now merges figurative and abstract painting. Mid-career overview of the work of one of the leading contemporary Norwegian artists today. The development of the artist is presented across 14 chapters comprising work and exhibition views. Sverre Bjertnaes is considered one of the leading contemporary Norwegian artists today. He himself often refers to his body of works as a fragmented 'stream of images' collected from art history, vernacular culture and his own life. This authoritative monograph on the artist features his oeuvre from the 1990s to the present day, with more than 200 illustrations. The book presents the full range of Bjertnaes's works, covering painting and drawing as well as sculpture and the tableaux installations he has developed in later years. Bjertnas embraces the conceptual approaches of photorealism as well as merging figurative and abstract painting, and experimenting with the use of new media.

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.

From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin ), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In "Untwisting the Serpent," Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media--Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's "Four Saints in Three Acts" is an opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes for "Parade."
Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's "Les Mamelles de Tiresias") or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's "Erwartung"). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations.
"Untwisting the Serpent" is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University.

Beginning with the instance in 1912 when Marcel Duchamp wrote in a note to himself, "No more painting, get a job," Thierry de Duve reviews in Pictorial Nominalism the implications of the readymade for art and representation. Arguing that the readymade belongs to that moment in the history of painting when both figuration and the practice of painting become "impossible," de Duve presents a psychoanalytically informed account of the birth of abstraction. Differing considerably from such thinkers as Clement Greenberg and Peter Burger, de Duve demonstrates that the readymade is the link between painting in particular and art at large.

This book introduces a compelling new personality to the modernist canon, Marisa Mori (1900-1985), who became the only female contributor to The Futurist Cookbook (1932) with her recipe for "Italian Breasts in the Sun." Providing something more complex than a traditional biographical account, Griffiths presents a feminist critique of Mori's art, converging on issues of gender, culture, and history to offer new critical perspectives on Italian modernism. If subsequently written out of modernist memory, Mori was once at the center of the Futurism movement in Italy; yet she worked outside the major European capitals and fluctuated between traditional figurative subjects and abstract experimentation. As a result, her in-between pictures can help to re-think the margins of modernism. By situating Mori's most significant artworks in the critical context of interwar Fascism, and highlighting her artistic contributions before, during, and after her Futurist decade, Griffiths contributes to a growing body of knowledge on the women who participated in the Italian Futurist movement. In doing so, she explores a woman artist's struggle for modernity among the Italian Futurists in an age of Fascism.

In contrast to Henry Moore's well-known drawings depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz, little has been written about how this son of a Yorkshire coalminer tackled his second commission from the War Artists' Advisory Committee in 1941; drawing men in 'Britain's underground army', the miners of Wheldale colliery. Redressing this imbalance, Chris Owen's comprehensive account of the coalmining drawings explores every aspect of the commission - from Moore's return to his childhood home and the challenges associated with 'drawing in the dark' to the significant influence of the project on Moore's later work, including the Warrior and Helmet Head sculptures, and his little-known illustrations to W.H. Auden's poetry. With illustrations drawn from Moore's rich body of sketches and finished drawings, along with press photographs recording the commission and a range of contextual material, text and images combine to present the definitive study of this impressive body of work.

For centuries the natural life of the British Isles has captured the imagination of both artists and scientists. The Art of British Natural History explores the many different ways in which Britain's flora and fauna have been documented, from engravings and watercolours to ink and charcoal drawings.The Art of British Natural History is illustrated with over 100 specially selected artworks from the collections of the Natural History Museum's Library and Archives. Together these images span 300 years of British history and include the works of major figures such as William MacGillivray, Moses Harris, Edward Wilson and Ernest Mansell. Andrea Hart's accompanying essay reveals that these images are both beautiful to look at and have also played a crucial role in advancing scientific knowledge in Britain. She also traces how these images have influenced the history of printing, art, and popular culture.

Willem de Kooning's six numbered Woman paintings have incited a maelstrom of critical controversy. At their debut in 1953, the critics were incensed by the ugliness of the images themselves and by the inclusion of vestiges of the figure in abstraction. Consequently, they questioned de Kooning's attitude toward women and commitment to the Abstract Expressionist project. Countering such objections to de Kooning's psychological state and artistic goals, Marlene Clark's The Woman in Me: Willem de Kooning, Woman I-VI argues that these canvases could be read as self-portraits, negating claims of misogyny and explaining the presence of figuration amidst abstraction. On a number of occasions, de Kooning admitted that the images on these canvases were "me-but with big shoulders." The Woman in Me focuses on de Kooning's propensity to "play" with the sexed body in his paintings. Clark argues that earlier criticism may have missed a more philosophical dimension of de Kooning's paintings, one that explores the malleability of representations of biological sex and the male/female binary.

Encountering Things brings together leading design scholars to explore the relationship between thing theory and design, exploring production processes and offering an engaging, theoretical perspective about the social and cultural lives of objects. Focusing on the themes of process and product, the contributors investigate the productive interplay between the activity of design and the objects that design uses and produces. Chapters span the design disciplines and essays examine the processes by which objects, things, and artifacts are made; the lives of design objects; and things in their cultural contexts. Theoretical discussion is encouraged by in-depth case studies of things themselves. Each chapter includes an informational sidebar per essay and a useful glossary of key terms.

This book presents an original study on how contemporary artists are exploring urban spaces through mapping. Despite a long history of representations of cities in maps, and the relationships that can be envisaged between art maps and cities in the contemporary world, little research is dedicated to investigating how artists intervene in the realm of urban cartography. The research examines a century-old history of art maps and draws on academic debates challenging traditional notions of maps as scientific artefacts produced through accurate measurement and surveying. The potential of art maps to construct personal narratives, through contestation, embodiment and play, is analysed in the city context, where spaces are shaped by urban planning and design, political ideologies and socio-economic forces. Adopting an exploratory and interpretative research approach that investigates the confluence of theories originated in different domains, this book conducts the reader to discover what artistic practices can bring into a more creative, while inquisitive, understanding of cities. A series of semi-structured interviews with visual artists, enquiring how they apprehend, process and re-create urban spaces in artworks, explores cartographic process and methods in visual art practices in the twenty first century, which incorporates digital technologies and critical thinking.

Diego Rivera's America revisits a historical moment when the famed muralist and painter, more than any other artist of his time, helped forge Mexican national identity in visual terms and imagined a shared American future in which unity, rather than division, was paramount. This volume accompanies a major exhibition highlighting Diego Rivera's work in Mexico and the United States from the early 1920s through the mid-1940s. During this time in his prolific career, Rivera created a new vision for the Americas, on both national and continental levels, informed by his time in both countries. Rivera's murals in Mexico and the U.S. serve as points of departure for a critical and contemporary understanding of one of the most aesthetically, socially, and politically ambitious artists of the twentieth century. Works featured include the greatest number of paintings and drawings from this period reunited since the artist's lifetime, presented alongside fresco panels and mural sketches. This catalogue serves as a guide to two crucial decades in Rivera's career, illuminating his most important themes, from traditional markets to modern industry, and devoting attention to iconic paintings as well as works that will be new even to scholars-revealing fresh insights into his artistic process. Published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with University of California Press Exhibition dates: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: July 16, 2022-January 1, 2023 Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas: March 11-July 31, 2023

Clement Greenberg is widely recognized as the most influential and articulate champion of modernism during its American ascendency after World War II, the period largely covered by these highly acclaimed volumes of _The Collected Essays and Criticism_. _Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals_ presents Greenberg's writings from the period between 1950 and 1956, while _Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance_ gathers essays and criticism of the years 1957 to 1969. The 120 works range from little-known pieces originally appearing _Vogue_ and _Harper's Bazaar_ to such celebrated essays as "The Plight of Our Culture" (1953), "Modernist Painting" (1960), and "Post Painterly Abstraction" (1964). Preserved in their original form, these writings allow readers to witness the development and direction of Greenberg's criticism, from his advocacy of abstract expressionism to his enthusiasm for color-field painting.With the inclusion of critical exchanges between Greenberg and F. R. Leavis, Fairfield Porter, Thomas B. Hess, Herbert Read, Max Kozloff, and Robert Goldwater, these volumes are essential sources in the ongoing debate over modern art.