Rudolph Ihlee (1883-1968) was a prize-winning student at the Slade where his contemporaries included Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, C.R.W. Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. Turning his back on a flourishing career in London, he relocated to the southern French town of Collioure, where the Mediterranean light had mesmerised artists such as Derain and Matisse before him. Exploring for the first time Ihlee's impressive oeuvre in the context of a fascinating biography, this book provides a lively account of the career of an accomplished but under-appreciated artist, who found creative freedom and personal contentment on the inspirational Catalan coast.

Auguste Rodin is still justifiably recognized today as not only one of the greatest sculptors of all time, but also the father of modern sculpture. His monument to the "Burghers of Calais" is one of the best-known public sculptures in the world. So much so that Edward Horswell decided to curate an exhibition dedicated to the burghers in 2015. Having spent more than 10 years building one complete set, the Sladmore was fortunate to secure a second, which, coupled with the gallery's current stock holding of burghers and related works, created a most informative exhibition: several examples of the same sculpture could be viewed together, affording rich comparisons. In this beautifully illustrated publication, Horswell explains how the monument came to fruition and looks at the casting history of the 50 separate works Rodin made on this subject and focusing on the five reductions made between 1895 and 1903. It also includes an essay by Patrick Elliott, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, which looks at the monument and its influence on sculpture and sculptors from its first unveiling in 1895 to today.

From the Roaring Twenties and the Group of Seven to the Automatistes and the early Cold War, Canadian artists lived through and embodied an era of global tumult and change. With an interweaving of historical narrative, lavish illustrations, and writings by many of Canada's most revered cultural figures, Lora Senechal Carney illuminates the lives, perspectives, and works of the era's painters and provides glimpses of the sculptors, poets, dancers, critics, and filmmakers with whom they associated. Canadian Painters in a Modern World gives readers direct access to a carefully curated selection of writings, artworks, photos, and other documents that help to reconstruct the public spheres in which artists including Paul-Emile Borduas, Emily Carr, Alex Colville, Lawren Harris, David Milne, and Pegi Nicol MacLeod circulated. Each of the book's eight chapters consists of a narrative about a key issue or debate, focusing on the relationship of art to politics and society, and on how these are negotiated in an individual's life. Relating artistic engagement with and responses to the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the Cold War, Senechal Carney discovers a common desire for new connections between art and life. Revealing continuities, ruptures, and watershed moments, Canadian Painters in a Modern World showcases artistic production within specific socio-political contexts to shed new light on Canadian art during three decades of conflict and crisis.

In this comprehensive collection of essays, three generations of international scholars examine Mexican muralism in its broad artistic and historical contexts, from its iconic figures - Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros - to their successors in Mexico, the United States, and across Latin America. These muralists conceived of their art as a political weapon in popular struggles over revolution and resistance, state modernization and civic participation, artistic freedom and cultural imperialism. The contributors to this volume show how these artists' murals transcended borders to engage major issues raised by the many different forms of modernity that emerged throughout the Americas during the twentieth century.

This publication showcases A Hard White Body, an evolving project by Candice Lin presented at B tonsalon--Centre d'art et de recherche, Paris; at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main; and at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. A Hard White Body weaves together material and nonhuman histories alongside the life and work of three historical figures: American writer James Baldwin (1924-1987); French explorer and global traveler Jeanne Baret (1740-1807); and artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Lin uses porcelain, a material whose history includes nineteenth-century imperial and scientific uses, to highlight fantasies surrounding whiteness and purity, only to subject her porcelain assemblages to pungent organic materials. She thus stages processes of contamination between organic and inorganic materials, creating an unstable sculptural ecosystem. In addition to an essay by curator Lotte Arndt that discusses the various iterations of Lin's project, the publication features an essay by Rizvana Bradley; a conversation between Jih-Fei Cheng and Mel Y. Chen; and a conversation between the artist and C. Riley Snorton. These texts are accompanied by a visual essay by the artist and a selection of exhibition views.

In Mother Stone Anne Middleton Wagner looks anew at the carvings of the first generation of British modernists, a group centered around Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Jacob Epstein. Wagner probes the work of these sculptors, discusses their shared avant-garde materialism, and identifies a common theme that runs through their work and that of other artists of the period: maternity. Why were artists for three turbulent decades after the First World War seemingly preoccupied with representations of pregnant women and the mother and child? Why was this the great new subject, especially for sculpture? Why was the imagery of bodily reproduction at the core of the effort to revitalize what in Britain had become a somnolent art? Wagner finds the answers to these questions at the intersection between the politics of maternity and sculptural innovation. She situates British sculpture fully within the new reality of "bio-power"-the realm of Marie Stopes, Brave New World, and Melanie Klein. And in a series of brilliant studies of key works, she offers a radical rereading of this sculpture's main concerns and formal language. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The first book to explore two of the biggest names in modern and contemporary art side by side, Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons

In the first half of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp redefined what we consider art and what it means to be an artist.

Many of his ideas return, transformed, in the work of Jeff Koons, born when Duchamp was 68 years old and whose own career lit up the art world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This is the first book to explore the affinities between these two highly influential artists, whose creative universes similarly question the function of objects and the allure of commodities.

International art historians, writers, and curators contribute their expertise on topics such as each artist's persona, as well as reflecting on the influence of technology and sexuality on their work.

The publication of this intriguing book coincides with an exhibition at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, opening in May 2019.

In the first three decades of the 20th century Augustus John (1878-1961) was widely considered one of the greatest living British artists, famous almost as much for his extraordinary Bohemian lifestyle as for his outstanding portraits, etchings and drawings. John was born in Wales in 1878 and educated at the Slade School of Art in London in the 1890s, where the onus of teaching was on the daily life class and a close study of the Old Masters. He soon emerged as a wonderfully gifted draughtsman - indeed, the American painter John Singer Sargent would declare that John's youthful drawings were amongst the fi nest seen since the Renaissance. Dividing his life between England, Wales and France, and reaching his prime in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Great War, by 1910 John would be likened to a British Gauguin, a Welsh Post-Impressionist using bold colours and a willfully naive and primitive style to explore the complex combination of romanticism, escapism and alienation engendered by 20th-century life. The great American collector John Quinn considered John and his sister Gwen key European artists, and his work would be included in the infl uential Armory Show in New York in 1913. After the War he would become Britain's leading society portraitist, earning a fortune in commissions - though it was his more personal paintings of friends, lovers, family and fellow artists and writers such as W.B. Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Ottoline Morrell and his muse/ mistress Dorelia McNeill that best revealed his great talents. Published to coincide with exhibitions at Poole Museum in Dorset in the summer of 2018 and at Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire in the summer of 2019, Augustus John: Drawn from Life re-examines the life and work of this signifi cant but increasingly overlooked British artist. Focusing on around sixty works drawn from private and public collections, including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Wales, the book will off er new insights into John's life and development as an artist from the late 1890s to the outbreak of the Second World War.

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.

One of the most recognizable artists of his era, Amedeo Modigliani is also perhaps one of the least understood. In this thorough, yet refreshingly concise volume, Werner Schmalenbach examines Modigliani's oeuvre, offering a chronological tour of every aspect of Modigliani's career. The informative commentary is complemented by numerous splendid reproductions, many of them full-page color illustrations. The result is an intimate portrait of a life devoted to art and an essential reference for any art lover.

This large-format, lavishly illustrated book offers a comprehensive survey of the fin-desiecle and modernist painting of Scandinavia. This book features an enormous variety of artists and works that explore the impact of Nordic geography, history, social mores, and national identities on the region s painters. Focusing on the core countries Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland as well as the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the Danish-German border region, the authors present a thematically organized overview of Nordic art between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing from the most recent scholarship, the book considers the prevalent themes and subjects, such as landscapes, genre scenes, portraits, interiors, modern city life, and abstraction, and analyzes various works by artists such as Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershoi, Helene Schjerfbeck, Johannes S. Kjarval, and Sigrid Hjerten. It looks at the rise of modernism in Nordic art and discusses the artistic interaction between North and Central Europe. A final chapter is devoted to the significance of Nordic painting today.Comprehensive and authoritative, this beautifully illustrated book is certain to become the standard volume on Nordic art. "

Intellectual, emotional, restless, dogged, loyal, selfish; Kandinsky was an artist - and a man - of contradictions. This genre-defying painter didn't pick up a brush until he was thirty years old. He was an academic with a promising career that he threw away to explore the arts. He was a Russian, yet he spent more than half of his life on the road, and died in self-imposed exile in France. As an artist he is credited with history's first abstract painting, but it was his theories that had a profound and lasting impact on the way that people understand and value what art can achieve. Richly illustrated with specially commissioned artworks and 20 of Kandinsky's major works, This is Kandinsky forms the perfect introduction to the life of this revolutionary figure in twentieth-century art.

Of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish artists, a large number turned toward radical socialist politics. These artists, even the most secularized among them, were deeply influenced by the Jewish traditions, teachings, and culture in which they were raised. The communal thrust of Judaism that calls upon Jews to bear the responsibility for the moral, spiritual, and material welfare of their community informed the creative output of these artists. Baigell explores the meaningful yet little-examined connections between religious heritage, social concerns, and political radicalism in the Jewish American art world from the time of the Great Migration from Eastern Europe in the 1880s to the beginning of World War II. Focusing on political cartoons published in left-wing Yiddish- and English-language newspapers and magazines, Baigell shows how artists commented on current events using biblical and other Jewish references within a medium of expression that had the widest possible audience. Set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, the Depression, and the rise of fascism during the 1930s, the book examines the work of such well-known artists as William Gropper and Mark Rothko, and brings to light the work of lesser-known artists, such as Leon Israel and Louis Ribak. Artists' personal correspondence, newspaper articles, and the writings of art critics all reveal the intimate connections between Jewish memories, religious customs, and radical socialist concerns.

American Modern presents a fresh look at The Museum of Modern Art's holdings of American art made between 1915 and 1950, and considers the cultural preoccupations of a rapidly changing American society in the first half of the 20th century. Organized thematically and featuring paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and film, the publication brings together some of the Museum's most celebrated masterworks, contextualizing them across mediums and amidst lesser-seen but revelatory works. The selection of works by artists such as Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Charles Burchfield and Stuart Davis include urban and rural landscapes, scenes of industry, still-life compositions and portraiture. Although varying in style and specifics, they share certain underlying visual and emotional tendencies. Cityscapes and factories are eerily emptied of the crush of residents that flocked to them, becoming both a celebration of clean modern form and technological advances, as in Sheeler's paintings and photographs, and a reflection of anxiety about increasingly urban life-styles and their consequences for the American individual, as in Hopper's iconic Night Windows. Equally silent rural scenes are no less haunting, but perhaps reflect a nostalgia for seemingly simpler times, and a celebration of early American traditions and values. Rather than an encyclopedic view of American art of the period, this volume is a focused look at the strengths and surprises of MoMA's collection in an area that has played a rich and major role in the institution's history.

Making van Gogh focuses on the œuvre of Vincent van Gogh in the context of its reception. The publication examines the particular role which German gallerists, collectors, critics and museums played in the story of his success. At the same time it sheds light on the importance of van Gogh as a role model for the avant-garde generation of artists.

“Van Gogh is dead, but the van Gogh-chaps are alive! And how alive they are! It is van Goghing everywhere”, was how Ferdinand Avenarius described it in 1910 in the magazine Der Kunstwart. Vincent van Gogh’s paintings exerted a particular fascination on young artists in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Barely fifteen years after his death the Dutch artist was seen as one of the most important forerunners of modern painting. A selection of key works from all van Gogh’s creative phases are juxtaposed with works by Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and others.

Encountering the work of Alan Davie (1920-2014) at Wakefield Art Gallery in 1958, a young David Hockney (b.1937) was struck by Davie's landmark Abstract Expressionist paintings, which mirrored and stimulated his own fledgling experimentation with colourful abstraction. Juxtaposing the remarkable early work of two greats of post-war painting, this book provides an original perspective on an important aspect of two significant artistic careers. A richly illustrated text demonstrates points of convergence - such as the painterly surface, passion and poetry, and an exploration of text within the pictorial frame - while also presenting divergence, moving the discussion beyond comparison to reveal a moment when each artist expanded the expressive potential of the painted canvas. Seeking to suggest new relationships and continuities between two generations previously segregated, this beautifully produced publication is ambitious in its intention, pushing the boundaries of traditional interpretations of British art history.

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.

"For the first time, the real story behind the Highwaymen has emerged . . . a well-researched, lively, and comprehensive overview of the development and contribution of these African-American artists and their place in the history of Florida's popular culture."--Mallory McCane O'Connor, author of "Lost Cities of the Ancient Southeast"

"The Highwaymen" introduces a group of young black artists who painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in citrus groves and packing houses of 1950s Florida. As their story recaptures the imagination of Floridians and their paintings fetch ever-escalating prices, the legacy of their freshly conceived landscapes exerts a new and powerful influence on the popular conception of the Sunshine State.

While the value of Highwaymen paintings has soared in recent years, until now no authoritative account of the lives and work of these black Florida artists has existed. Emerging in the late 1950s, the Highwaymen created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida dream and peddled some 100,000 of them from the trunks of their cars.
Working with inexpensive materials, the Highwaymen produced an astonishing number of landscapes that depict a romanticized Florida--a faraway place of wind-swept palm trees, billowing cumulus clouds, wetlands, lakes, rivers, ocean, and setting sun. With paintings still wet, they loaded their cars and traveled the state's east coast, selling the images door-to-door and store-to-store, in restaurants, offices, courthouses, and bank lobbies.
Sometimes characterized as motel art, the work is a hybrid form of landscape painting, corrupting the classically influenced ideals of the Highwaymen's white mentor, A. E. "Bean" Backus. At first, the paintings sold like boom-time real estate. In succeeding decades, however, they were consigned to attics and garage sales. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as the work of American folk artists.
Gary Monroe tells the story behind the Highwaymen, a loose association of 25 men and 1 woman from the Ft. Pierce area--a fascinating mixture of individual talent, collective enterprise, and cultural heritage. He also offers a critical look at the paintings and the movement's development. Added to this are personal reminiscences by some of the artists, along with a gallery of 63 full-color reproductions of their paintings.
Gary Monroe, professor of visual art at Daytona Beach Community College, is a documentary photographer with a long-time interest in "outsider" and vernacular art. His work has been recognized with numerous exhibitions and awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, and he has been a popular lecturer for the Florida Humanities Council's Speakers Bureau. His photographs have been published in "Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community" (UPF, 2000), which he coedited; "Life in South Beach" (1989); and "Florida Dreams" (1993). He lives in DeLand, Florida.

Step into a world of star-crossed lovers, magical winds, mischievous giants, and trolls, through some of the most exquisite illustrations in publishing history. In this gorgeous abridged edition, TASCHEN revives the most ambitious publication project of beloved Danish artist Kay Nielsen, one of the most famous children's book illustrators of all time. First published in 1914, East of the Sun and West of the Moon is a celebrated collection of fairy tales gathered by legendary Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Engebretsen Moe on their journeys across Norway in the mid-19th century. Nielsen's illustration edition of Asbjornsen and Moe's tales is considered a jewel of early 20th-century children's literature, highly sought-after by art and book collectors worldwide. An original signed copy of the book sold at auction in 2008 commanded the highest price ever paid for an illustrated children's book. This finely crafted volume presents 10 of the original fairytales, and restores the stunning detail and artistry of Nielsen's images to their original splendor. Featuring 41 illustrations, including many enlarged details from Nielsen's rare original watercolors. The book comes with three accompanying essays, illustrated with dozens of rare and previously unseen artworks by Nielsen, that explore the history of Norwegian folktales, Nielsen's life and work, and how this masterpiece came to be.

To the interested observer the collected volumes of artist-designer Eric Ravilious's preparatory works and materials provide a veritable mine of information about his work and working methods, particularly regarding the masterful development of his signature pure pattern. Ravilious's scrapbooks represent a conscious accumulation of reference material, revealing his interest in subjects as diverse as tennis, cricket, fireworks and aeronautics, alongside a multitude of sketches, tracings and proofs of engravings. Ravilious' scrapbooks do not contain the mass of fascinating but disparate material, seen for example in similar volumes compiled by his great friend and artistic contemporary Edward Bawden. Rather, they document the considered progression of an inquisitive mind, grasping his chosen subjects in a unique and delicate visual language, where many of the artist's most famous motifs and images can be seen blossoming from embryonic stages. Bringing together over 170 images taken from the artist's 5 scrapbooks, accompanied by instructive commentary by the authors, this new book provides a fascinating record of the febrile imagination of one of Britain's best-loved artists.

The fact that Paul Klee (1879 - 1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered - until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee's works from the 1910s and 1920s. Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written, and his concern for literary aspects of visual art was both the motive for and the means of his ironic play with modernist art theories and practices. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen - along with film and other new technologies - as threats to a mode of slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in early twentieth-century Germany, Bourneuf ultimately shows how Klee reimagined abstraction at a key moment in its development.

This publication is the first of four volumes in the catalogue raisonne of Francis Picabia (1879-1953), one of the most significant, challenging artists of the 20th century. The works in Volume I range from Picabia's early pieces as an Impressionist in the 1890s to his Cubist and abstract paintings of 1912-14, which constitute landmarks in the history of modern art. This volume allows for new critical and scientific readings of his work and piques interest in his lesser-known pieces. Along with illustrations of each featured work, the book includes an introduction, chronology, bibliography, list of exhibitions, and indices. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

This book, like the exhibition it accompanies, takes as a starting point four important paintings in the collection of the Museo Novecento, which belonged to collector Alberto Della Ragione, including a rare watercolour of a female figure that reveals Morandi's extraordinary artistic abilities. It illustrates paintings, drawings, and prints that have been kept in various private collections. Exit Morandi also celebrates Morandi's relationship with art critics such as Roberto Longhi, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Cesare Brandi and Francesco Arcangeli.