The theme of the erotic is ever present in the work of Auguste Rodin, both in his sculptures and in his many drawings. Throughout his career, he depicted sexual desire in all its facets, in every mood from delicate innocence to frank intensity, bearing witness to an endless fascination with the flesh and a love of the female form. Taking a chronological path through Rodin's life, this is an intimate approach to the many faces of sex and sensuality in his body of work and in the society within which his art was forged. The text discusses his relationships with women, his friendships with poets and artists, and the controversy that his sculptures caused in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when French society was marked by a hypocritical disparity between public morals and private desires. This witty and perceptive book, packed with beautiful images, will shed new light on this intriguing aspect of the artist's world and his skill at capturing the fleeting nature of pleasure in timeless art.

When R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were found on his bookshelves - Herbert Read's Art Now (1933) and Surrealism (1936), edited by Read and containing essays by key figures in the Surrealist movement. Some three dozen previously unknown poems handwritten by Thomas were then discovered between the pages of the two books, poems written in response to a selection of the many reproductions of modern art in the Read volumes, including works by Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Graham Sutherland - many of whom were Thomas's near contemporaries. These poems are published here for the first time - alongside the works of modern art that inspired them. Thomas's readings of these often unsettling images demonstrate a willingness to confront, unencumbered by illusions, a world in which old certainties have been undermined. Personal identity has become a source of anguish, and relations between the sexes a source of disquiet and suspicion.Thomas's vivid engagements with the works of art produce a series of dramatic encounters haunted by the recurring presence of conflict and by the struggle of the artist who, in a frequently menacing world, is 'too brave to dream'. At times we are offered an unflinching vision of 'a landscape God / looked at once and from which / later he withdrew his gaze'.

In 1943, while the world was convulsed by war, a few visionaries--in the private sector and in the military--committed to protect Europe's cultural heritage from the indiscriminate ravages of World War Two.
And so the Allies appointed the Monuments Officers, a motley group of art historians, curators, architects, and artists, to ensure that the masterpieces of European art and architecture were not looted or bombed into oblivion. Often working as shellfire exploded around them, the Monuments men and women of Italy shored up tottering palaces and cathedrals, safeguarded Michelangelos and Giottos, and even blocked a Nazi convoy of stolen paintings bound for Goring's birthday celebration. Sometimes they failed. But to an astonishing degree they succeeded, and their story is an unparalleled adventure with the gorgeous tints of a Botticelli as its backdrop.

COLOURFIELD PAINTING

Sixties painting was variously termed Colourfield, Hard Edge, Minimal, and post-painterly abstraction, and was linked with Pop Art, Op (optical) Art, chromatic art, kinetic abstraction, wholistic art, pure-painting, geometric abstraction, ABC Art, Cool Art, Non-gestural Painting, Non- Relationalism, Abstract Mannerism and Abstract Sublime painting.

The painters linked in this study with Colourfield, Hard Edge Minimal and Post-Painterly Abstraction painting include Minimal artists such as Brice Marden, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt and Robert Ryman; Colourfield painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam and Morris Louis; post-painterly abstractionists such as Frank Stella, David Novros, Richard Diebenkorn, Al Held, Jo Baer and Jules Olitski; and Hard Edge painters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Joseph Albers and Elisabeth Murray.

Colourfield, Minimal, Hard Edge and Post-Painterly Abstract painting had a distinctly American (and New York) flavour to it, even if it was not produced in America or by US artists. In Bruce Glaser s Questions to Andre and Judd, Donald Judd continually stressed the point that the new (Minimal) art was definitely American and non-European. Time and again Judd insisted that the new art was to trying to get away from the European tradition. It suits me fine if that s all down the drain, Judd said. I m totally uninterested in European art and I think it s over with.

Many of the Colourfield and Sixties painters have made extremely brilliantly colourful works in the 1960s, then turned back to the sombre colours of grey and black in the late 1980s and 1990s. Painters such as Brice Marden, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Jules Olitski are ambiguous about saturated colour: they moved back and forth from monochrome greys and blacks to full colour. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, painters such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jules Olitski and Larry Poons moved from bright colour to muted monochrome. Mid-1990s works by Frank Stella were unpainted, using instead the natural colours of metal and wood; Brice Marden turned from his luscious monochromes of the 1970s and 1980s to the black-and-white of Chinese calligraphy in the Cold Mountain series and other works.

Fully illustrated, with notes and bibliography.

Making a vital contribution to the understanding of Latin American modernism, Esther Gabara rethinks the role of photography in the Brazilian and Mexican avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. During these decades, intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil were deeply engaged with photography. Authors who are now canonical figures in the two countries' literary traditions looked at modern life through the camera in a variety of ways. Mario de Andrade, known as the "pope" of Brazilian modernism, took and collected hundreds of photographs. Salvador Novo, a major Mexican writer, meditated on the medium's aesthetic potential as "the prodigal daughter of the fine arts." Intellectuals acted as tourists and ethnographers, and their images and texts circulated in popular mass media, sharing the page with photographs of the New Woman. In this richly illustrated study, Gabara introduces the concept of a modernist "ethos" to illuminate the intertwining of aesthetic innovation and ethical concerns in the work of leading Brazilian and Mexican literary figures, who were also photographers, art critics, and contributors to illustrated magazines during the 1920s and 1930s.

Gabara argues that Brazilian and Mexican modernists deliberately made photography err: they made this privileged medium of modern representation simultaneously wander and work against its apparent perfection. They flouted the conventions of mainstream modernism so that their aesthetics registered an ethical dimension. Their photographic modernism strayed, dragging along the baggage of modernity lived in a postcolonial site. Through their "errant modernism," avant-garde writers and photographers critiqued the colonial history of Latin America and its twentieth-century formations.

A new title of the 5-volume series covering the fundamental events and pivotal works of international art in the 20th century. With the third volume, this history of art goes past the halfway mark of the 20th century to enter the contemporary sphere. The book relates how artists reacted to the greatest tragedy of the 20th century and responded to the advent of the society of mass communication and consumption, to the moulding of the world in which we find ourselves ever more deeply immersed today. The collapse and rebirth of Europe, the years of the Cold War and the evolution leading to the upheavals of 1968 are fundamental themes of this third volume.

This series offers a complete, up-to-date survey of the phenomena of the 1900s and the first years of the new millennium through an original, transversal and interdisciplinary analysis of artistic culture in the twentieth century. The second volume analyses and presents the hugely diverse world of artistic production between the two world wars, taking into consideration not only the environment that took shape in the immediate wake of the First World War, from the so-called 'return to order' to the re-emergence of a figurative approach (The New Objectivity, Novecento Italiano, and Magic Realism) that was profoundly anti-avant-garde yet imbued with strong plastic and semantic values, but also the evolution of an avant-garde that was now historicised, with its second-generation artists (Aerial Painting, the second generation of Futurism). Also considered in this title are the codification of certain phenomena, such as Surrealism, changes in taste (from Art Deco to Novecentismo), as well as art as the expression of the totalitarian regimes, and the outbreak of the Second World War, with the embracing of environments outside Europe, particularly the USA. The chronological boundaries are marked by the birth of the Dadaist experience in Germany and the establishment of Metaphysics in Italy (1917- 1920) on one side and by the birth of the great season of U.S. Abstract Expressionism (1943-1945) on the other.

"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in "Art and Illusion," another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death.

With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.

Luigi Russolo (1885OCo1947)OCopainter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movementOCowas a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futuristOCOs interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that RussoloOCOs aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the "intonarumori," were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.

In 1977, Margaret Wood was a twenty-four-year-old living an ordinary life in Lincoln, Nebraska. That year, her life changed as she came to Abiquiu, a remote village in northern New Mexico, where she began a five-year stay as companion and caretaker to then eighty-nine year old Georgia O'Keeffe. There were no sign posts in the village in those years, and few markers for a young woman managing the complex role as companion to a woman of O'Keeffe's stature who nonetheless was now dependent on others to maintain the independent life she had cultivated so fiercely. Growing and preparing food was one of O'Keeffe's greatest pleasures, with the artist mentoring her young caregiver on the art of gardening and cooking. Wood and O'Keeffe often walked the red hills of Ghost Ranch in early evenings, the place where the artist experienced true freedom. The artist had a reputation of living a secluded life, but in fact enjoyed welcoming a host of visitors to her home. Wood shares anecdotes about these social exchanges, along with a treasure trove of stories intimately shared. When Wood's father -- the photographer Myron Wood -- came to visit, he asked for and received permission to photograph O'Keeffe. A dozen of these historic images, published a decade later in the seminal publication, O'Keeffe's Abiquiu, are reproduced to complement Margaret Wood's quiet insights of life spent with O'Keeffe.

De Stijl (`The Style') was the name given to the work of the architects, designers and artists associated with the magazine of the same name edited by Theo van Doesburg and founded in Holland in 1917. De Stijl was international in its outlook: in contact with the Bauhaus and the Russian Constructivists, it helped to create the ideology and formal language of modernism. Mondrian is De Stijl's best-known artist, while Oud, Wils, Huszar and Rietveld were its major architects and designers. Their aim was an objective art concerned with universal values, expressed in primary geometric forms and pure colours. In this book, De Stijl is reassessed by Paul Overy in the light of Post-modernist debates and documentary material only recently made available.

With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman--many of which have never before been available in English--and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.

Anna Moszynska shows here how abstract art originated and evolved, placing it in its broad historical and cultural context. She traces the paths to abstraction forged by artists such as Balla, Kupka and Delaunay, and examines the pioneering work of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, the Russian Constructivists, the De Stijl group and the Bauhaus artists, and contrasts the geometric tendencies of the 1930s and 1940s with the post-War emphasis on personal expression that culminated in Abstract Expressionism in the United States. Finally, Anna Moszynska considers the work of 'Post-Painterly', Op, Kinetic and Minimal artists and examines the revived abstraction practised by Neo-Geo and other artists of the 1980s.

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.

Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction offers a fresh and revealing assessment of the artist's prolific and innovative painterly career. The comprehensive exhibition and accompanying catalogue will feature approximately seventy paintings and works on paper by Hofmann from 1930 through the end of his life in 1966, including works from public and private collections across North America and Europe. Curator Lucinda Barnes builds on new scholarship published over the past ten years and the 2014 catalogue raisonne to present Hofmann as a unique synthesis of student, artist, teacher, and mentor who transcended generations and continents. His singular artistic achievement drew on artistic influences and innovations that spanned two world wars and transatlantic avant-gardes. Over the last fifty years Hofmann has come to be understood primarily from the vantage of his late color-plane abstractions. Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction expands our understanding and reinvigorates our appreciation of Hofmann through an inclusive presentation of his artistic arc, showing the vibrant interconnectedness and continuity in his work of European and American influences from the early twentieth century through the advent of abstract expressionism. Published in association with the Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Exhibition dates: Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): February 27-July 21, 2019 The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA: September 21, 2019-January 6, 2020

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cezanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

In 1967, sex between consenting men in England and Wales was finally decriminalised - an entire century after the death penalty was abolished for sodomy in Britain in 1861. Between these legal landmarks lies a century of seismic shifts in gender and sexuality which found expression across the arts as artists, collectors and consumers explored transgressive identities, experiences and perspectives. Some of the resulting artworks were intensely personal, celebrating lovers or expressing private desires. Others addressed a wider public, helping to forge a sense of community at a time when the modern categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender were largely unrecognised. Ranging from the playful to the political, the explicit to the domestic, these works reveal the rich diversity of queer British art. This beautiful book explores coded desires in aestheticism; the impact of the new science of sexology; queer domesticities; eroticism in the artist's studio; intersections of gender and sexuality; seedy dives and visions of Arcadia; and love and lust in sixties Soho. Featuring works by major artists such as Simeon Solomon, Clare Atwood, Ethel Sands, Duncan Grant, Francis Bacon and David Hockney among others, Queer British Art pays homage to the wealth of queer creativity in Britain between the 1860s and the 1960s.

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.

This authoritative reference work examines literary and artistic responses to the war's upheavals across a wide range of media and genres, from poetry to pamphlets, sculpture to television documentary, and requiems to war reporting. Rather than looking at particular forms of artistic expression in isolation and focusing only on the war and inter-war period, the 27 essays collected in this volume approach artistic responses to the war from a wide variety of angles and, where appropriate, pursue their inquiry into the present day. In 6 sections, covering Literature, the Visual Arts, Music, Periodicals and Journalism, Film and Broadcasting, and Publishing and Material Culture, a wide range of original chapters from experts across literature and the arts examine what means and approaches were employed to respond to the shock of war as well as asking such key questions as how and why literary and artistic responses to the war have changed over time, and how far later works of art are responses not only to the war itself, but to earlier cultural production.

In Abstract Art Against Autonomy, Mark Cheetham provides a revolutionary account of abstraction in the visual arts since the decline of the formalist paradigms in the 1960s. He claims that abstract work remains a vital contributor to contemporary visual culture, but that it performs in a way that is different from its predecessors of the early and mid-twentieth century and cannot adequately be assessed without new models of understanding. Cheetham posits that abstraction has reacted to paradigms of purity with practices of impurity. By examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance and cure, Cheetham provides an opportunity to rethink paradigmatic genres - the monochrome and the mirror - and to link in new ways the work of artists whose work extends and complicates the tradition of abstract art, including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley, General Idea and Taras Polataiko.

Why was New York abstract expressionism so successful after World War II? To answer that question, Serge Guilbaut takes a controversial look at the complicated, intertwining relationship among art, politics, and ideology. He explores the changing New York and Paris art scenes of the Cold War period, the rejection by artists of political ideology, and the coopting by left-wing writers and politicians of the artistic revolt.

More than most artists, Henri Matisse conducted an ongoing dialogue with his earlier works, continually questioning himself and his methods in order to, as he put it, "push further and deeper into true painting". In a fresh approach to this giant of 20th-century art, "Matisse: In Search of True Painting" examines sixty works and more than five decades in a series of concise chapters by prominent Matisse scholars from the United States and Europe, each focusing on a particular aspect of his artistic development. From early pairs such as Young Sailor I and II (1906) and Le Luxe I and II (1907-8) through five Interiors at Nice (1917-21) to scenes from the studio in Vence (1946-48), the book shows Matisse responding to earlier styles and artists and developing his own, often radical, answers to such problems as how to portray light, handle paint, select colours, and manipulate perspective. The volume also discusses findings from new technical studies carried out on the early paired works that shed more light on Matisse's complex and deeply-felt evolution. Both an intimate glimpse into the artistic process and a significant addition to literature on modern art, "Matisse: In Search of True Painting" traces the path by which Matisse becomes himself.

In recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume, Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of modern and contemporary art. This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey. Placing "process art" within a larger historical context, Grant looks at the changing relations of the artist's labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist's role in modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor. Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and contemporary art reveals how artists' explicit engagement with the concept fits into a broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.

Established in 1919 in Weimar, the Bauhaus college for design influenced one of the world's most important Modernist movements. Divided into three geographic sections that follow the locations of the school-Weimar (1919-25), Dessau (1925-33), and Berlin (1933)-this unique travel guide leads readers through the most important Bauhaus structures in Germany. Each section features important sites that are given historical background. These entries are illustrated with historic and contemporary photography, and are accompanied by up-to-date tourist information. Throughout the book short essays highlight significant events and figures of the Bauhaus movement. This guidebook is an indispensible reference for anyone traveling to Germany's greatest extant Bauhaus structures.