From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities. But the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. In "Hitler's Holy Relics, "bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and equally unholy Reich.
Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into the bedrock beneath Nurnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to have been used to pierce Christ's side while he was on the cross) and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation upon Nurnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city Hitler called "the soul of the Nazi Party," five of the most precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the war's end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing treasures.
To accomplish his mission, Horn must revisit the now-rubble-strewn landscape of his youth and delve into the ancient legends and arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted in his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the burnt remains of Himmler's private castle and follows the trail of neo-Nazi "Teutonic Knights" charged with protecting a vast hidden fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn has to confront his own demons: how members of his family and former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help legitimize Hitler's theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so explosive that his final report will remain secret for decades.
Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as well as on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews in the United States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing story with cinematic detail and reveals-- for the first time--how a failed Vienna art student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history.

What has been the significance of sport for the European avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century? From an international and interdisciplinary perspective we show the extent to which avant-garde art and culture was shaped by the dynamic encounter with modern sports. Our focus lies on avant-garde artists, groups, movements and institutions across Europe (including Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Purism, Expressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Constructivism in Central and Eastern Europe), thereby unfolding the diversity of avant-garde responses to modern sports. The book in front of you includes fascinating readings in the fields of aesthetics, visual cultures, cultural history and politics and highlights why specific kinds of sport such as cycling, boxing and football became important for avant-garde movements and artists.

Considered on of the most important religious structures of the twentieth century, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence was regarded by Matisse himself as his great masterpiece. He dedicated four years to the creation of this convent chapel on the French Riviera, and the result is one of the most remarkable and comprehensive ensemble pieces of twentieth-century art. Every element of the chapel bears the artists touch, from the vivid Mediterranean hues of the stained glass windows to the starkly powerful murals; even the vestments and altar were designed by Matisse. This beautifully illustrated volume captures the chapel in exquisite detail, allowing an unparalleled view of this iconic and sacred space. With stunning new photography that captures the dramatic effects of the changing light in the building throughout the day, this book is the first to present the experience of being within the chapel exactly as Matisse himself envisaged it, while Marie-Therese Pulvenis de Selignys authoritative and insightful text explores the extraordinary story of the chapels creation and the challenges faced by the 77-year-old artist in realising his great vision."

The Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang is a Marxist-Surrealist Yugoslav epic poem for children, written by Aleksandar Vuco and accompanied by Dusan Matic's photocollage illustrations and captions. The poem tracks the adventures of five scrappy, resourceful working-class boys who endeavor to free an equally plucky girl from the evil clutches of a convent school (and its fearsome nuns). While weighing in on various contemporary political issues, the story is unpredictable, action-packed and relayed in richly colloquial language. Matic's photocollages show "what happened in the meantime" between the "songs" (episodes) of the poem, providing clever twists to the linear plot as well as an illustration of the surrealist concepts of time, space and the transformative capabilities of art.

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraismo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafes, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on Spatiality, Palomares-Salas convincingly argues that an unsolvable tension between place and space is at the core of the Hispanic avant-garde cultural production. A refreshing, transatlantic perspective on Ultraism and Stridentism, the book moves the Hispanic vanguards forward into broader, international discussions on space and modernism, and offers innovative readings of well-known, as well as rarely studied works.

Art for the workers explores the mythology and reality of post-revolutionary proletarian art in Russia as well as its expression in the festive decorations of Petrograd between 1917 and 1920. It covers this brief period chronologically, and so permits a close inspection of the development of artistic policies in Russia under the Provisional Government followed by the Bolsheviks. Specifically, this book focuses on the pre-and post-revolutionary debate about the nature of proletarian art and its role in the new Socialist society, particularly focusing on festive decorations, parades and mass performances as expressions of proletarian art and forms of propaganda.

What provoked the fierce and systematic 'will to experiment' that was Modernism? Paranoia--thought especially to afflict those whose identities were founded on professional expertise--was described in the contemporary psychiatric literature as the violent imposition of system onto life's randomness. Modernism's great writers--Conrad, Ford, Lewis, Lawrence--both lived and wrote about these psychopathies of expertise.

Part of an exciting series of sturdy, square-box 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles from Flame Tree, featuring powerful and popular works of art. This new jigsaw will satisfy your need for a challenge, with L.S. Lowry's Going to Work. This 1000 piece jigsaw is intended for adults and children over 13 years. Not suitable for children under 3 years due to small parts. Finished Jigsaw size 735 x 510mm/29 x 20 ins. Now includes an A4 poster for reference. This painting is an example of one of L.S. Lowry's famous crowd scenes. The colour palette is unusually light and airy for the artist, with pink and gold-tinged buildings lifting the atmosphere. Lowry said of this painting, 'To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people ... They were part of a private beauty that haunted me!' In his many depictions of north-west England Lowry makes industrial scenes his own, showing how industry had affected the landscape and how the inhabitants of the urban areas lived out their daily lives. Marches, evictions, accident s, illness, relaxation at the park or the fair, going to work, coming out o f school and going to the football match were all subjects for Lowry's brush or pencil. His works were created in his own unique style, poetic yet not sentimental, compelling, even at times disturbing, but never judgemental.

Address book companion to the exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features William Morris' Seaweed. Born in Kent, William Morris was an outstanding character of many talents, being an architect, writer, social campaigner, artist and, with his Kelmscott Press, an important figure of the Arts and Crafts movement. Many of us probably know him best, however, from his superb furnishings and textile designs, intricately weaving together natural motifs in a highly stylized two-dimensional fashion influenced by medieval conventions.

A year of weekly interviews (1949-1950) with artist Diego Rivera by poet Alfredo Cardona-Pena disclose Rivera's iconoclastic views of life and the art world of that time. These intimate Sunday dialogues with what is surely the most influential Mexican artist of the twentieth century show us the free-flowing mind of a man who was a legend in his own time; an artist who escaped being lynched on more than one occasion, a painter so controversial that his public murals inspired movements, or, like the work commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, were ordered torn down. Here in his San Angelin studio, we hear Rivera's feelings about the elitist aspect of paintings in museums, his motivations to create public art for the people, and his memorable, unedited expositions on the art, culture, and politics of Mexico. The book has seven chapters that loosely follow the range of the author's questions and Rivera's answers. They begin with childlike, yet vast questions on the nature of art, run through Rivera's early memories and aesthetics, his views on popular art, his profound understanding of Mexican art and artists, the economics of art, random expositions on history or dreaming, and elegant analysis of art criticisms and critics. The work is all the more remarkable to have been captured between Rivera's inhumanly long working stints of six hours or even days without stop. In his rich introduction, author Cardona-Pena describes the difficulty of gaining entrance to Rivera's inner sanctum, how government funtionaries and academics often waited hours to be seen, and his delicious victory. At eight p. m. the night of August 12, a slow, heavy-set, parsimonious Diego came in to where I was, speaking his Guanajuato version of English and kissing women's hands. I was able to explain my idea to him and he was immediately interested. He invited me into his studio, and while taking off his jacket, said, "Ask me..." And I asked one, two, twenty... I don't know how many questions 'til the small hours of the night, with him answering from memory, with an incredible accuracy, without pausing, without worrying much about what he might be saying, all of it spilling out in an unconscious and magical manner. A series of Alfredo Cardona-Pena's weekly interviews with Rivera were published in 1949 and 1950 in the Mexican newspaper, El Nacional, for which Alfredo was a journalist. His book of compiled interviews with introduction and preface, El Monstruo en su Laberinto, was published in Spanish in 1965. Finally, this extraordinary and rare exchange has been translated for the first time into English by Alfredo's half-brother Alvaro Cardona Hine, also a poet. According to the translator's wife, Barbara Cardona-Hine, bringing the work into English was a labor of love for Alvaro, the fulfillment of a promise made to his brother in 1971 that he did not get to until the year before his own death in 2016.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

A leading figure of the postwar avant-garde, Danish artist Asger Jorn has long been recognized for his founding contributions to the Cobra and Situationist International movements - yet art historical scholarship on Jorn has been sparse, particularly in English. This study corrects that imbalance, offering a synthetic account of the essential phases of this prolific artist's career. It addresses his works in various media alongside his extensive writings and his collaborations with various artists' groups from the 1940s through the mid-1960s. Situating Jorn's work in an international, post-Second World War context, Karen Kurczynski reframes our understanding of the 1950s, away from the Abstract-Expressionist focus on individual expression, toward a more open-ended conception of art as a public engagement with contemporary culture and politics. Kurczynski engages with issues of interest to twenty-first-century artists and scholars, highlighting Jorn's proposition that the sensory address of art and its complex relationship to popular media can have a direct social impact. Perhaps most significantly, this study foregrounds Jorn's assertion that creativity is crucial to subjectivity itself in our increasingly mediated 'Society of the Spectacle.'

Address book companion to the exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Bodleian Libraries: A Readers' Delight. The Bodleian Library is one of the oldest libraries in Europe and is the main research library of the University of Oxford. It holds over 13 million printed items and this handsome trio of spines are just three examples of the beautiful objects in the Library's collection. With colourful illustrations and charming tales, these story anthologies showcase the sports and hobbies young people could enjoy during the 1930s.

A group of primarily Scottish artists (mainly William York Macgregor, Joseph Crawhall, George Henry, Edward Atkinson Hornel, Sir John Lavery and Arthur Melville), the Glasgow Boys were active around the turn of the 20th Century. Though they painted in a number of different styles, they are connected by their rejection of classic Victorian painting. Inspired by the luminous techniques of James McNeil Whistler, they harnessed Impressionistic brushwork and livid realism in their work, trying new methods and everyday settings to create stunning works of art. With over 100 images, and broad introduction, this is a fine addition to Flame Tree's ever-increasing series on painting and illustration, Masterpieces of Art.

Exploring the ways in which painting, applied design and illustration intertwined over the course of the accomplished career of Paul Nash (1889-1946), this book provides a new perspective on one of the most gifted and celebrated English artists of the twentieth century. Skilfully navigating the diversity of Nash's design output, which drew in illustration, book jackets, posters, set design, pattern papers, fabrics, glass, ceramics and photography, in the context of Nash's painting and wider pre-occupations, James King presents an artist who strove to resolve his artistic vision. With Nash's work informed by seismic shifts within the visual arts during his lifetime - from the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement on the one hand, to Surrealism and Abstraction on the other - this fascinating book reveals the considerable gifts that allowed Nash to create a wholly original vision in turn.