Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, and Stanley Spencer were five of the most important British artists of the 20th century. From diverse backgrounds, they all met at The Slade in London between 1908 and 1910, in what was later described at the school's 'last crisis of brilliance'.

Departing from his earlier figurative works and engagement with Futurist ideals, Italian painter Osvaldo Licini (1894-1958) turned away from realism in 1940 and painted only abstract works from then on. His paintings from that fruitful decision engage in a surrealist language of precise lines, solid colors and pregnant signs; colors and signs that Licini viewed as expressions of energy, willpower, ideas and magic. This catalog of Licini's show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the most comprehensive monograph of his work, marks the 60th anniversary of his death. That same year, Licini won the National Grand Prize for Painting at the 29th Venice Biennale, where he had shown 53 works--executed between 1925 and 1958--in a room of his own, mounted by Carlo Scarpa. This catalog gathers his complete works, including those displayed in that same venue 60 years prior to this 2018 show.

Although she is only now just coming into much deserved global renown as the woman behind "Awkward Objects," one of ArtForum's Best of 2012, the Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow has long been recognized in her country as one of the most accomplished female artists of the twentieth century. Collected in this volume for the first time are Szapocznikow's letters to and from the art critic and former director of the Lodz Museum of Art Ryszard Stanislawski, which span from the inception of their relationship through their marriage and divorce.

"Lovely, Human, True, Heartfelt" documents Szapocznikow's artistic process and inspirations and is a rare window through which to view the complex internal life of Szapocznikow as an artist, Holocaust survivor, and woman. For art historians and enthusiasts, this correspondence offers an important context for understanding Szapocznikow's often enigmatic work and id a fascinating look at the recovery of the artistic community in Europe after World War II. The volume includes comprehensive notes on the political and artistic climate surrounding each letter, as well as providing biographical information that creates an even more nuanced portrait of the two writers.

More than simply a historical resource, "Lovely, Human, True, Heartfelt "offers readers an intimate epistolary romance written with deep passion and remarkable literary flair.

Barcelona is well known as a center of contemporary art and architecture, but that prominence owes much to the creative outpouring it witnessed at the dawn of the twentieth century, when it was known as the "rose of fire." The physical city was transformed by the civil engineer Ildefonso Cerda and the architects Antoni Gaudi and Lluis Domenech. As Barcelona changed around them, modernist artists including Pablo Picasso, Isidre Nonell, and Ramon Casas produced work fueled by and focused on political and humanitarian concerns.

Barcelona 1900 portrays the artistic, cultural, social, and political history of the city at this crucial turning point. Featuring more than 192 color and black-and-white illustrations paintings, sculptures, drawings, and objects of applied art the book illustrates the development of the modern city, Art Nouveau, and modernism alongside Barcelona's tumultuous social conflicts, the daily life of the middle classes, the anarchist movement, and the anticlerical sentiment of the day.In a series of thematic chapters, Barcelona 1900 explores the city's artistic flowering in all its dimensions: paintings by Picasso, Casas, and Santiago Rusinol; the Art Nouveau jewelry of Lluis Masriera; public and domestic architecture by Gaudi, Domenech, and Josep Puig; posters, advertisements, and other ephemera by Casas and other proponents of modernisme; and works of Catalan literature.

Accompanied by a wealth of historical and contemporary photographs of the cityscape, this book which also serves as the catalog for a landmark exhibition of the same name organized by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam invites the reader to promenade along the most remarkable spots in the city, from Las Ramblas, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, and the Palau de la Musica; to Els Quartes Gats, the cafe where Picasso and his friends met; and Parc Guell and Gaudi's Sagrada Familia."

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Sketch Books Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. The thick paper stock makes them perfect for sketching and drawing. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Klimt's Fulfillment

Part of a series of 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 Alphonse Mucha's Cowslip. Alphonse Mucha was a defining figure of the Art Nouveau era and is beloved for his images of beautiful women. Cowslip forms the mirror to another of Mucha's artworks, Feather. In both, a woman gazes down at the eponymous object in her hand, though whilst Cowslip shows a brunette, Feather depicts a blonde. Both have the familiar motif of a circle framing the head, which can be seen in many of Mucha's artworks.

Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918) is nowadays regarded as one of the leading pioneers of Modernism in Austria. Although he already enjoyed some success during his lifetime and came to be considered Austria's greatest artist following his death, his outstanding impo rtance for art was recognized only in the early 1950s. Rudolf Leopold, the early collector of Schiele who first became interested in Schiele in the 1950s, has been instrumental in raising the international profile of Egon Schiele. Today, his art treasures are housed in the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which holds the world's largest and most outstanding collection of works by Schiele. Diethard Leopold, the collector's son and author of this volume, naturally grew up with Schiele's works, developing a special affinity and familiarity with the artist and his works. In this monograph he examines the life of the painter, who died prematurely at the age of 28, and based on major works from every one of his creative periods he presents an artist who captivates the viewer with emotional subjects and technical ingenuity al ike. In the archive section of this volume, special finds from the rich trove of documents he left behind show the copious talent of Egon Schiele who not only excelled as a painter and graphic artist, but also awaits discovery for his expressionist poetry.

European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. In response, American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. Through literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove-particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure-that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. Yet by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. They remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War. Drawing on interviews, previously unknown archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and Voice of America, Barnhisel reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, with profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity.

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.

It was the decade of Coco Chanel and Josephine Baker, Art Deco and Surrealism, cafe culture and cabarets. Americans Hemingway and Man Ray mingled with emigres Brancusi, Chagall and Archipenko and painters from Matisse and Picasso to Dali in the bohemian arts scene of Montparnasse, while Brassai photographed the pulsating dance halls of Montmartre. This portrait spanning literature, painting, fashion and film takes a fresh look at the annees folles of 1920s Paris.

One of the most important and underappreciated visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden started as a cartoonist during his college years and emerged as a painter during the 1930s, at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance and in time to be part of a significant community of black artists supported by the WPA. Though light-skinned and able to "pass, " Bearden embraced his African heritage, choosing to paint social realist canvases of African-American life. After World War II, he became one of a handful of black artists to exhibit in a private gallery-the commercial outlet that would form the core of the American art world's post-war marketplace. Rejecting Abstract Expressionism, he lived briefly in Paris. After he suffered a nervous breakdown, Bearden returned to New York, turning to painting just as the civil rights movement was gaining ground with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott. By the time of the March on Washington in 1963, Bearden had begun to experiment with collage-or Projection, as he called it-the medium for which he would ultimately become famous. In An American Odyssey, Mary Schmidt Campbell offers readers an enlightening analysis of Bearden's influences and the thematic focus of his mature work. Bearden's work provides an exquisite portrait of memory and the African American past; according to Campbell, it also offers a record of the narrative impact of visual imagery in the twentieth century, revealing how the emerging popularity of photography, film and television depicted African Americans during their struggle to be recognized as full citizens of the United States.

The first substantial book on the French Neo-Romantics, a cosmopolitan group working in 1920s Paris who turned against modernist abstraction in favour of a new form of figurative painting. In 1926, the Galerie Druet in Paris made waves presenting a group of young painters who had spurned modernist abstraction and returned to a form of figurative painting. For most of them this was the first time they had exhibited, but their impact was considerable. Art critic Waldemar George baptized them the 'Neo-Romantics' or the 'Neo-Humanists'. They were influenced by Picasso, in particular his Blue and Rose periods, but went beyond him to forge new ways of painting. These were artists who liked to play with forgotten references and obsolete visual devices such as trompe l'oeil. They produced work for secondary art forms including the theatre, set design and ballet. In some ways they were the first post-modernists in the history of art, yet until now there has only ever been one book about them, After Picasso, published ten years after their exhibition. Only more recently has their influence on contemporary artists and thinkers including Max Jacob, George Hugnet and Gertrude Stein been recognized. Though friends, these painters never formed a formal group or movement. The Second World War sent them on different paths, with the Berman brothers and Tchelitchev moving to the United States. Before their departure, however, their activities attracted the attention and admiration of a cosmopolitan group of characters, including Gertrude Stein, Alfred Barr, Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine and many others including leading fashion figures of the day, Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli.

One of the most innovative artists and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) emigrated to Britain after the forced closure of the Bauhaus, following his colleague Walter Gropius. This book examines the two years he spent in Britain in the mid-1930s before moving on to the United States - two intense years filled with commissions, collaborations, opportunities, disappointments, artistic exchanges and friendship. Moholy-Nagy was especially known in the UK as a photographer, his photos having previously been published in the Architectural Review. Although brief, Moholy-Nagy's English period represented the peak of his photographic activity. In Britain, he also worked as a graphic designer on books, advertisements and on London Transport posters. He worked as an art advisor for Simpsons' menswear store and designed publicity for the Isokon Furniture Company. He made a couple of documentary films - Lobsters and New Architecture at London Zoo and worked as a designer on Things to Come for Alexander Korda. As well as the films and photographic essays for the AR, he was introduced by John Betjeman to publisher John Miles, who commissioned him to illustrate three books: The Street Markets of London, Eton Portrait and An Oxford University Chest. He also worked with Gropius and Maxwell Fry on various exhibition designs, gave lectures and wrote articles throughout his stay, and The London Gallery held an exhibition of his work in January 1937. This highly visual book weaves together rarely seen images, documents and narrative to create a fascinating picture of the man and the artist during this critical and highly productive phase of his life.

What if there were no objective facts, no objective truth, only our belief in them? What if our consciousness itself is an unconscious invention, constructed out of logic and language? In this thought-provoking volume, Lynn Segal describes how the ideas of Heinz von Foerster compel us to explore the question "Do we discover the world or do we invent it?." He suggests that we must first know how we think before we can claim knowledge of the world. While Constructivism may seem relevant only to those in the cognitive sciences, it is, in fact, highly relevant to everyone. Paradoxically, grasping the limits of our own understanding can free us to live more creative and meaningful personal and professional lives.

German art student Otto Schubert was 22 years old when he was drafted into the Great War. As the conflict unfolded, he painted a series of postcards that he sent to his sweetheart, Irma. During the battles of Ypres and Verdun, Schubert filled dozens of military-issued 4" x 6" cards with vivid images depicting the daily realities and tragedies of war. Beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of his exquisite postcards, as well as his wartime sketches, woodcuts, and two lithograph portfolios, Postcards from the Trenches is Schubert's war diary, love journal, and life story. His powerful artworks illuminate and document in a visual language the truths of war. Postcards from the Trenches offers the first full account of Otto Schubert, soldier-artist of the Great War, rising art star in the 1920s, prolific graphic artist and book illustrator, one of the "degenerate" artists defamed by the Nazis, and a man shattered by the Second World War and the Cold War. Created in the midst of enormous devastation, Schubert's haunting visual missives are as powerful and relevant today as they were a century ago. His postcards are both a young man's token of love and longing and a soldier's testimony of the Great War.

The Wiener Werkstatte, founded by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Fritz Waerndorfer, was an artists' and craftsmen's collective that existed in Vienna from 1903 until 1932. The artists' goal was to bring high-quality design and craft into all areas of life and to elevate everyday objects into pieces of art. During that time, the collective produced items in a variety of media including ceramics, furniture, glass, jewelry, metalwork, and textiles. The Wiener Werkstatte style influenced generations of architects from Bauhaus to Art Deco. This book features the work of well-known Wiener Werkstatte members such as Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Dagobert Peche along with lesser known designers such as Gudrun Baudisch, Carl Otto Czeschka, and Ugo Zovetti. It also includes in-depth essays that explore the Wiener Werkstatte's long history and legacy.

C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946) is regarded as one of the finest British printmakers of the first half of the twentieth century - admired by contemporaries and modern-day viewers in equal measure. Yet despite this assured reputation, nothing substantial has been published on his remarkable printmaking career until now. Nevinson began creating prints in 1916, only stopping, due to ill health, in 1932. During this period he produced 148 prints, all of which reflecting his distinct vision and outstanding skills as a printmaker. Providing historical and social insights, his body of work is impressive in its range - images depicting the horrors of the First World War sit alongside contrasting cityscapes which present Nevinson's singular interpretation of Paris, New York and London. Drawing on original archival research and including a catalogue raisonne of Nevinson's prints, this unrivalled resource stands as a landmark publication in the literature available on this outstanding British modernist. It is an essential reference volume for all those who collect, sell or study Nevinson's prints and also provides much needed context for those with a general interest in the artist and the period in which he worked.

Les Fauves (the wild beasts) was the nickname given in 1905 to a group of painters led by Henri Matisse. Today, their paintings are among the most popular of all twentieth-century art. Yet when Matisse and his friends - Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, Dufy and Braque among them - first exhibited their work, the reaction of public and critics was astonishment and often hostility. Using strong, even strident, colors, applied in a manner deriving from Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, the Fauves took painting back to its basic principles, inspired by primitive art, popular prints and children's paintings, and paved the way to Cubism. The artists, their work, their relationships, their achievements and the critical and commercial response to their work are discussed in this absorbing book, the first in many years to offer a reappraisal of Fauvism.

This book offers the first sustained examination of the cultural relations of the American and Soviet avant-gardes in a period of major transformation. From the formation of the USSR in 1922 until its recognition by the American government, American avant-garde artists, writers and designers watched the 'Red Dawn' with fascination, enthusiastically reporting on its post-revolutionary cultural developments in articles and books, and brought these works to an American audience in ground-breaking exhibitions. Americans also emulated and adapted aspects of Soviet culture, as in the case of the New Playwrights Theatre, a group that mixed Russian avant-garde theatrical techniques with jazz, vaudeville and slapstick comedy in plays about strikes and racial injustice. Figures discussed include Louis Lozowick, Jane Heap, Frederick Kiesler, Ralph Steiner, John dos Passos, Margaret Bourke-White and Langston Hughes. Watching the red dawn takes an innovative interdisciplinary approach, considering these developments in architecture, theatre, film, photography and literature, and will be invaluable for students and specialists in these subject areas. It provides a new perspective on American avant-garde culture of the inter-war years. -- .

In the mid-1950s, declaring "there is no reason not to consider the world as a gigantic painting," Robert Rauschenberg began a series of radical experiments with what he called "Combines," a term he coined to describe works that fused cast-off items like quilts or rubber tires with traditional supports. "Canyon" (1959), one of the artist's best-known Combines, is a large canvas affixed with paper, fabric, metal, personal photographs, wood, mirrors and one very striking object: a large stuffed bald eagle, wings outstretched, carrying a drooping pillow, and balanced upon a wooden plank jutting out from the canvas. "Canyon" is one of six Combines in MoMA's collection, and a landmark work that helped to revolutionize art in the postwar period. An essay by curator Leah Dickerman explores the legacy of this extraordinary piece, and places it within a key period in Rauschenberg's career.

Now available again, this book is a penetrating exploration of the American realist painter Edward Hopper, who was able to capture the many moods of the nation he called home. From his images of deserted small towns and solitary figures in empty offices to his cheerfully tranquil New England landscapes, Hopper's most famous compositions can be seen as products of a life spent observing human nature. Hopper's images evoke an enigmatic uncertainty, which speaks to the heart of the American experience. Hopper's talent for depicting multiple aspects of the post-war experience is the focus of this generously illustrated and engaging volume.

Baroque between the Wars is a fascinating account of the arts in the twenties and thirties. We often think of this time as being dominated by modernism, yet the period saw a dialogue between modern baroque - eclectic, playful, camp, open to influence from popular culture but connected with the past, and unafraid of the grotesque or surreal - and modernism, which was theory-driven, didactic, exclusive, and essentially neo-classical. Jane Stevenson argues that both baroque and classical forms were equally valid responses to the challenge of modernity. Setting painting and literature in the context of 'minor arts' such as interior design, photography, fashion, ballet, and flower arranging, and by highlighting the social context and sexual politics of creative production, Stevenson offers a new and exciting interpretation of one of the most renowned artistic movements of the 20th century. Accessibly written and generously illustrated, the volume focuses on artists, artefacts, clients, places, and publicists to demonstrate how baroque offered a whole new way of being modern. The modern baroque was an active subversion of the tenets of modernism, practised by the people that modernism habitually excluded. Stevenson brings those excluded groups into the centrefold of the modern baroque movement in a rich history of the alternative style which has influenced much of the art, architecture, performance and literature of today.

The first decades of the twentieth century were pivotal for the historical and formal relationships between early cinema and Cubism, mechanomorphism, abstraction, and Dada. To examine these relationships, Jennifer Wild's interdisciplinary study grapples with the cinema's expanded identity as a modernist form defined by the concept of horizontality. Found in early methods of projection, film exhibition, and in the film industry's penetration into cultural life by way of film stardom, advertising, and distribution, cinematic horizontality provides a new axis of inquiry for studying early twentieth-century modernism. Shifting attention from the film to the horizon of possibility around, behind, and beyond the screen, Wild shows how canonical works of modern art may be understood as responding to the changing characteristics of daily life after the cinema. Drawing from a vast popular cultural, cinematic, and art-historical archive, Wild challenges how we have told the story of modern artists' earliest encounter with cinema and urges us to reconsider how early projection, film stardom, and film distribution transformed their understanding of modern life, representation, and the act of beholding. By highlighting the cultural, ideological, and artistic forms of interpellation and resistance that shape the phenomenology of a wartime era, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900 1923 provides an interdisciplinary history of radical form. This book also offers a new historiography that redefines how we understand early cinema and avant-garde art before artists turned to making films themselves.