Diane Arbus was one of the greatest photographers of the last century. Her portraiture of freaks, circus performers, twins, nudists and others on the social margins connected with a wide public at a deep psychological level. Her suicide in New York in 1971 overshadowed the reception to her work. Her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a year later drew lines around the block. She was born into a Russian-Jewish family, the Nemerovs, who owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. They were family friends with the Avedons. Richard Avedon later championed Arbus's work. Avedon rose to greater and greater commercial success through the magazine world. Arbus died in a rent-protected apartment scrambling to earn her keep with odd teaching assignments. Lubow's biography begins at the moment Arbus quit the world of commercial photography to be an artist. She was uncompromising in that ambition. The book ends with her death. The entire narrative is a slow march towards that event.

When the State Bauhaus opened in Weimar in 1918, the Swiss artist and art theorist Johannes Itten (1888 - 1967) was one of the first teachers to be appointed by Walter Gropius. With his preliminary course, Itten had a considerable effect on the creative training in the Bauhaus; to this day his insights into the theory of colours set standards in art education and in the field of design. Enquiring mind and lecturer, painter and art teacher - Johannes Itten was a very thoughtful artist personality which was reflected in numerous theoretical texts and artworks covering a wide range of styles. Constantly in dialogue with students and colleagues as well as in a study of other cultures and artistic ideas, Itten created works in which he examined colours, their aura, contrasts and forms. Inspired by Adolf Hoelzel, his teacher at the Stuttgart Academy, Itten developed, amongst other things, the famous doctrine of colour types whose significance extends far beyond the realms of art into everyday culture. The acknowledged Itten expert Christoph Wagner introduces the artist with his complex and symbolic work and traces an arc from the revolutionary Bauhaus teacher and founder of various art schools to the art theorist of the theory of colours.

I 2019 er det 150-arsjubileum for Harald Sohlbergs fodsel. Utstillingen i Nasjonalgalleriet hosten 2018 og i London og Wiesbaden i 2019 vil danne en flott opptakt til aktiviteter og fornyet interesse for denne viktige norske kunstneren. Magiske landskaper, myke blomsterenger og kalde vinternetter: Sohlbergs motivkrets kombinerer elementer fra en romantisk naturoppfattelse med tendenser fra det samtidige kunstuttrykket. Hans bilder tilhorte ingen spesifikk kunstnerisk retning, selv om den er sterkt knyttet til symbolismen. Det er spenningen mellom det tradisjonstro og det moderne som gjor hans billedverden spesiell bade i norsk og internasjonal sammenheng. Utstillingskatalogen presenterer rundt 60 malerier samt en rekke av kunstnerens tegninger, trykk og fotografier. Katalogtekstene setter Sohlberg inn i en kunstnerisk kontekst, bade nar det gjelder forholdet til tidligere tiders kunst og hans samtidige norske og internasjonale kollegaer. Sohlberg hadde noen spesifikke steder han hentet sine motiver fra. Den stedlige tilknytningen til Rondane, Roros, Oslo og Helgeroa inngar som et viktig gjentagende element i hans billedverden. Bildene til Sohlberg legger til rette for at betrakteren skaper sine egne fortellinger. I mange av landskapsmaleriene er fravaeret av mennesker pafallende, ikke minst fordi de samtidig inneholder spor etter menneskelig aktivitet; landbruk, bygninger, veier, telegrafstolper, industri, for a nevne noe. Mennesket og det moderne liv i historiske omgivelser er et sentralt tema, ofte med et modernitetskritisk blikk.

When the First World War broke out, Morris Meredith Williams was living in Edinburgh with his wife Alice, a sculptor, and earning his living from book illustration and teaching. A short man, his attempt to join the army in 1914 failed, but six months later he was accepted by the 17th Battalion, The Welsh Regiment, the first Bantam battalion to be raised in Wales. From June 1916, he spent ten months in and out of the trenches of the Western Front near Loos, Arras and the Somme, later mapping enemy positions from aerial reconnaissance shots with the Heavy Artillery. In 1918 he joined the Royal Engineers' camouflage unit at Wimereux. After the peace, he was among a handful of artists kept back to make paintings for the official record and toured the shattered landscape in an old ambulance car. Never without a sketchbook and pencils in his pocket, he drew at every opportunity, producing an extraordinary record of his surroundings. After the war some of the sketches became oil paintings while others inspired a series of war memorials in bronze, stone, wood and stained glass, most notably for the Scottish National War Memorial, on which he and Alice worked together. In this stunning book, the Meredith Williams's art is displayed in fine style, ranging from the touching and heartfelt to the most brutal, stark images of the waste and loss of war.

Flags and Faces, based on David Lubin's 2008 Franklin D. Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas, shows how American artists, photographers, and graphic designers helped shape public perceptions about World War I. In the book's first section, Art for War's Sake," Lubin considers how flag-based patriotic imagery prompted Americans to intervene in Europe in 1917. Trading on current anxieties about class, gender, and nationhood, American visual culture made war with Germany seem inevitable. The second section, Fixing Faces," contemplates the corrosive effects of the war on soldiers who literally lost their faces on the battlefield, and on their families back home. Unable to endure distasteful reminders of war's brutality, postwar Americans grew obsessed with physical beauty, as seen in the simultaneous rise of cosmetic surgery, the makeup industry, beauty pageants, and the cult of screen goddesses such as Greta Garbo, who was worshipped for the masklike perfection of her face. Engaging, provocative, and filled with arresting and at times disturbing illustrations, Flags and Faces offers striking new insights into American art and visual culture from 1915 to 1930.

A sweeping painterly chronicle of the war, and a vital part of Australia's heritage.Richard Travers, the author of Diggers in France: Australian Soldiers on the Western Front, now turns his attention to the Australians who painted the Great War. In To Paint A War he follows artists such as Tom Roberts, Grace Cossington Smith, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Arthur Streeton and George Coates - detailing how they left Australia in search of inspiration and fame in London and Paris and lived enviable lives suddenly interrupted by the outbreak of war.To Paint A War is the story of their response to the crisis. Their work, in all its richness and variety, is a sweeping painterly chronicle of the war, and a vital part of Australia's heritage.

'Heady, lively, engaging...brings Montmartre's heyday back to life' - Sunday Times 'Brilliant' - Guardian The real revolution in the arts first took place not, as is commonly supposed, in the 1920s to the accompaniment of the Charleston, black jazz and mint juleps, but more quietly and intimately, in the shadow of the windmills - artificial and real - and in the cafes and cabarets of Montmartre during the first decade of the century. The cross-fertilization of painting, writing, music and dance produced a panorama of activity characterized by the early works of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and Modigliani, the appearance of the Ballet Russe and the salons of Gertrude Stein. In In Montmartre, Sue Roe vividly brings to life the bohemian world of art in Paris between 1900-1910.

This comprehensive book is both a biographical exploration of the early life of Mary Seton Watts and a survey of the pottery she designed. Her roots in Scotland, her artistic career and her marriage to the Victorian artist George Frederic Watts all influenced the design of the Grade 1 listed Cemetery Chapel at Compton and the art potteries which she then set up, both in Compton (The Potters' Arts Guild) and in her home village near Inverness. The pottery at Compton was in business for more than fifty years, making terracotta garden ware, memorials and small decorative pieces. It remained open through two World Wars and a trade depression. This highly illustrated publication showcases the beautiful and individual pieces of pottery and is a fitting tribute to the ability of Mary Watts to coordinate both people and resources.

A sumptuously illustrated survey of the remarkable flowering of radical, visionary and experimental design for performance in Russia in the twenty years between 1913 and 1933. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian theatre produced an unprecedented period of creative radicalism and collaborative experimentation. Against the turbulent backdrop of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the avant-garde movement transformed Russia's cultural landscape as visionaries from several disciplines generated a vortex of innovative performance and design. The astounding body of work produced by Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Sergei Eisenstein and Liubov Popova, among others, overturned traditions in art, music, literature and theatre. This book explores the importance and influence of a seminal moment in twentieth-century culture - one that still resonates today. Published to accompany a major exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum in association with the Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum in Moscow, this book includes essays by experts from Russia, Britain and America illustrated with over 150 images from leading artists and designers, many of which are previously unpublished. Edited by John E. Bowlt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California, the result is an astonishing record of a period of creative innovation that redefined not only what was possible in theatre and the avant-garde, but in wider artistic practices too. It will be of interest both to theatregoers and art historians, as well as current and future designers seeking inspiration for their own work.

The artist who created the statue for the Lincoln Memorial, John Harvard in Harvard Yard, and The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) is America's best-known sculptor of public monuments. Monument Man is the first comprehensive biography of this fascinating figure and his illustrious career. Full of rich detail and beautiful archival photographs, Monument Man is a nuanced study of a preeminent artist whose evolution ran parallel to, and deeply influenced, the development of American sculpture, iconography, and historical memory. Monument Man was specially commissioned by Chesterwood / National Trust for Historic Preservation. The release will coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Chesterwood, his country home and studio, as a public site and with a major renovation of the Lincoln Memorial. The book includes a comprehensive geographical guide to French's public work.

Kurt Schwitters was a major protagonist in the histories of modern art and literature, whose response to the contradictions of modern life rivals that of Marcel Duchamp in its importance for artists working today. His celebrated Merz pictures--collaged and assembled from the scrap materials of popular culture and the debris of the studio, such as newspaper clippings, wood, cardboard, fabric, and paint--reflect a lifelong interest in collection, fragmentation, and abstraction, techniques he also applied to language and graphic design. As the first anthology in English of the critical and theoretical writings of this influential artist, Myself and My Aims makes the case for Schwitters as one of the most creative thinkers of his generation. Including material that has never before been published, this volume presents the full range of his prolific writing on the art and attitudes of his time, joining existing translations of his children's stories, poetry, and fiction to give new readers unprecedented access to his literary imagination. With an accessible introduction by Megan R. Luke and elegant English translations by Timothy Grundy, this book will prove an exceptional resource for artists, scholars, and enthusiasts of his art.

The publication explores the diversity of the lives and destinies of artists during the Weimar Republic, under National Socialism, and until the inaugural documenta held in the young Federal Republic in 1955. Their works and biographies bear witness to the horrors of persecution and careers cut short, to resistance and conformity. The presentation intertwines the individual lives with the parallel strands of contemporary history and institutional frameworks. Numerous authors shed light on issues that have recently attracted sustained interest from historians. The choice of emphases reflects the history of the Lenbachhaus's collection and exhibition program. The presentation accordingly focuses on the Munich art scene, complemented by major phenomena on the national and international stages. Diversity of biographies and topics of German art history between 1918 and 1955 With works by Otto Freundlich, Kathe Hoch, Rudolf Schlichter, Maria Luiko, George Grosz, Gabriele Munter, and others Exhibition Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau October 15, 2022-April 16, 2023

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.

Knitting together two fascinating but entirely distinct lives, this ingeniously structured braided biography tells the story of the lives and work of two women, each a cultural icon in her own country yet lesser known in the other's. Australian poet Judith Wright and Canadian painter Emily Carr broke new ground for female artists in the British colonies and influenced the political and social debates about environment and indigenous rights that have shaped Australia and Canada in the 21st century. In telling their story/ies, this book charts the battle for recognition of their modernist art and vision, pointing out significant moments of similarity in their lives and work. Although separated by thousands of miles, their experience of colonial modernity was startlingly analogous, as white settler women bent on forging artistic careers in a male-dominated world and sphere rigged against them. Through all this, though, their cultural importance endures; two remarkable women whose poetry and painting still speak to us today of their passionate belief in the transformative power of art.

The book is a comparative study of the constructivist avant-garde artists in Central Europe, the Hungarian MA group in exile in Vienna, the Blok group in Warsaw, and the Czech Devetsil association of artists in Prague. The author examines the similarities and significant differences among them. Contrary to often-repeated theses, the study reveals that the artists unremittingly sought new formulations for an initial set of formal and theoretical issues. It also demonstrates that they persistently believed that their works of art prefigured a future socialist society. The long-awaited socialist states that came into being after World War II betrayed the artists.

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.

This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the Nazis' total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of Jewish artists and other "enemies of the state" was a high priority for the Third Reich, removing them from German cultural life did not eradicate their artistic legacies. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of Nazi Germany to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life during the Third Reich.

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.

Painter, draftsman and engraver, Pierre Lesieur (1922-2011) was one of the most influential French artists of the second half of the 20th century. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris - where he took lessons from Andre Lhote - and at the Academie de Montmartre, he had his first exhibition in 1952. Lesieur's paintings of the 1950s are characterised by the use of brightly coloured areas, in line with the work of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. In the 1960s, this research bordered on abstraction, particularly in still lifes and representations of objects. From the 1970s onwards, through his paintings and drawings, Lesieur took a particular interest in interiors, as well as in portraits and female nudes. Early in his career, Pierre Lesieur was recognised as an important artist. After his first personal exhibition in 1952, his work was regularly shown at the Coard Gallery in Paris. From the 1990s, Lesieur's notoriety became international, resulting in further exhibitions in Japan and the United States. Some of his works are now housed in major museums such as the Center Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hiroshima Museum. Text in English and French.

Since the 2011 Arab Spring street art has been a vehicle for political discourse in the Middle East, and has generated much discussion in both the popular media and academia. Yet, this conversation has generalised street art and identified it as a singular form with identical styles and objectives throughout the region. Street art's purpose is, however, defined by the socio-cultural circumstances of its production. Middle Eastern artists thus adopt distinctive methods in creating their individual work and responding to their individual environments. Here, in this new book, Sabrina De Turk employs rigorous visual analysis to explore the diversity of Middle Eastern street art and uses case studies of countries as varied as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain and Oman to illustrate how geographic specifics impact upon its function and aesthetic. Her book will be of significant interest to scholars specialising in art from the Middle East and North Africa and those who bring an interdisciplinary perspective to Middle East studies.