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.

In Designing a New Tradition, Rebecca VanDiveRebecca VanDiver is Assistant Professor of African American Art at Vanderbilt University.r presents a fresh perspective on the art and career of Lois Mailou Jones. Considering the importance of Africa for Jones's work and examining the broader roles played by class, gender, and politics in constructions of African American art histories as a whole, VanDiver makes a convincing case for Jones's lasting place in American art history. VanDiver repositions Jones's work within the canon of American art, situating the artist's production within the larger cultural and aesthetic debates of the twentieth century, including modernism, abstraction, the Harlem Renaissance, feminism, Negritude, and Pan-Africanism. In doing so, VanDiver reveals one of Jones's most significant contributions to American art: the development of a composite black aesthetic that negotiates African, American, and European artistic traditions to reflect the increasingly fragmented nature of twentieth-century black identity and diasporic experiences. Tracing Jones's aesthetic transformations along a biographical arc, VanDiver offers a new framework for thinking about the connection between America and Africa and the role of the African diaspora in the creation of African American artistic identity. Accessibly written and filled with fascinating anecdotes about Jones's life and career, her many acquaintances, and the challenges she faced as a black woman artist working in the twentieth century, this book makes a singular contribution to a new and expanded art-historical canon.

Among his many captivating exploits, the French artist Yves Klein (1928 - 1962) invented his own brand of colour: the inimitable International Klein Blue. Denounced as a charlatan and feted as a mystic, Klein scandalized the art world with his enthusiastic embrace of the highs and lows of post-war mass culture and his exploitation of controversial publicity tactics. Today it is clear that Klein was not only one of the most radical artists of the post-war period but an iconic role model for contemporary practices: he reinvented abstract painting, conceived new horizons for performance art and was a trailblazer in the interdisciplinary realm of land, body and conceptual art. Nuit Banai examines the relationship between Klein's brief but incandescent life and his wide repertoire of artistic practices. The book establishes that Klein's brilliance was above all performative, as he created and inhabited a cast of public identities: avant-garde artist, bourgeois, judo expert, painter, charlatan, collaborator, politician, middle-class mystic, fascist and showman.With each persona, Klein invented new ways to communicate his paradoxical message of spiritual enlightenment and Dada iconoclasm to an unsuspecting, bemused and entranced audience. This new critical biography illuminates Klein's influential and multifaceted artistic career. Alongside contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys and postmodern chameleons like Cindy Sherman, Klein's protean performance of multiple roles stands as a landmark example of the artist's transformational status. An invaluable introduction to the life and work of this flamboyant individual, Yves Klein will appeal to students and scholars of Klein as well as those interested in contemporary art and twentieth-century culture.

Winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year 2015 Winner of the New Angle Book Prize 2017 John Craske, a Norfok fisherman, was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned thirty-six, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as 'a stuporous state'. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. His embroideries were also the sea, including his masterpiece, a huge embroidery of The Evacuation of Dunkirk. Very few facts about Craske are known, and only a few scattered photographs have survived, together with accounts by the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland, who discovered Craske in 1937. So - as with all her books - Julia Blackburn's account of his life is far from a conventional biography. Instead it is a quest which takes her in many strange directions - to fishermen's cottages in Sheringham, a grand hotel fallen on hard times in Great Yarmouth and to the isolated Watch House far out in the Blakeney estuary; to Cromer and the bizarre story of Einstein's stay there, guarded by dashing young women in jodhpurs with shotguns. Threads is a book about life and death and the strange country between the two where John Craske seemed to live. It is also about life after death, as Julia's beloved husband Herman, a vivid presence in the early pages of the book, dies before it is finished. In a gentle meditation on art and fame; on the nature of time and the fact of mortality; and illustrated with Craske's paintings and embroideries, Threads shows, yet again, that Julia Blackburn can conjure a magic that is spellbinding and utterly her own.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) lived art in the fast lane. With an appetite for glamour and fame as much as Left Bank bohemianism, she fled her native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and set about taking Paris by storm. Her prolific, monumental oeuvre remains one of the most vivid visual documents of 1920s Art Deco. De Lempicka's style deployed cool colors and tight post-cubist forms into an at once neoclassical and voluptuous figuration. Her subjects are often nude and always sensual, aloof, and powerful. Bedecked in seductive light and textures, they command our attention but typically avert their gaze with an aspect of haughty grandeur. They include both high-society patrons and progressive portraits of emancipated and lesbian women, such as Women Bathing and Portrait of Suzy Solidor. De Lempicka's notorious Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, meanwhile, was commissioned for the cover of German magazine Die Dame and became an icon of speed, sophistication, and female independence. Through some of de Lempicka's finest, most compelling portraits, this introduction explores the artist's unique visual language and its privileged place not only in the annals of interwar art but also in the history of female artists and our collective consciousness of the Roaring Twenties. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

A vivid, engaging account of the artists and artworks that sought to make sense of America's first total war, Grand Illusions takes readers on a compelling journey through the major historical events leading up to and beyond US involvement in WWI to discover the vast and pervasive influence of the conflict on American visual culture. David M. Lubin presents a highly original examination of the era's fine arts and entertainment to show how they ranged from patriotic idealism to profound disillusionment. In stylishly written chapters, Lubin assesses the war's impact on two dozen painters, designers, photographers, and filmmakers from 1914 to 1933. He considers well-known figures such as Marcel Duchamp, John Singer Sargent, D. W. Griffith, and the African American outsider artist Horace Pippin while resurrecting forgotten artists such as the mask-maker Anna Coleman Ladd, the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the combat artist Claggett Wilson. The book is liberally furnished with illustrations from epoch-defining posters, paintings, photographs, and films. Armed with rich cultural-historical details and an interdisciplinary narrative approach, David Lubin creatively upends traditional understandings of the Great War's effects on the visual arts in America.

Exploring the significance of metaphor in modern art "Where do the roots of art lie?" asked Der Sturm founder Herwarth Walden. "In the people? Behind the mountains? Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels." Walden's Der Sturm-the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910-1932)-has never before been the subject of a book-length study in English. Four Metaphors of Modernism positions Der Sturm at the center of the avant-garde and as an integral part of Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice. Jenny Anger traces Walden's aesthetic and intellectual roots to Franz Liszt and Friedrich Nietzsche-forebears who led him to embrace a literal and figurative mixing of the arts. She then places Der Sturm in conversation with New York's Societe Anonyme (1920-1950), an American avant-garde group modeled on Der Sturm and founded by Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Working against the tendency to examine artworks and artist groups in isolation, Anger underscores the significance of both organizations to the development and circulation of international modernism. Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water, and home, Four Metaphors of Modernism interweaves a historical analysis of these two prominent organizations with an aesthetic analysis of the metaphors that shaped their practices, reconceiving modernism itself. Presented here is a modernism that is embodied, gendered, multisensory, and deeply committed to metaphor and a restoration of abstraction's connection with the real.

Harry Bertoia, Sculptor is devoted to the life and work of a twentieth-century Italian-born American artist whose important commissions are located in twenty-five American cities from New York to Seattle and from Minneapolis to Miami. It traces the development of Bertoia's versatile career from his youth in Detroit, beginning with drawings, paintings, and monoprints, then jewelry and furniture designs, to his abstract sculptures in metals, many of architectural proportions. The book includes a biography of the man and detailed descriptions of his methods of working. Many major sculptures and some minor ones are described in detail. They are critically analyzed for their aesthetic components and the ideas they were intended to express. A large number of photographs supplements the descriptions and analyses. Two appendixes give chronologies of the artist's life and of his architectural commissions, the latter virtually a catalog of Bertoia's major works. Based on several extensive interviews with the artist, as well as on research into his earlier writings, the book includes Bertoia's thoughts on aesthetics and various phases of the art processes he uses. His work is categorized into four major aesthetic explorations that interested him most of his life.

A revelatory look at the residences of Adolf Hitler, illuminating their powerful role in constructing and promoting the dictator's private persona both within Germany and abroad Adolf Hitler's makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator's preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler's bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator's three dwellings-the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg-to foster the myth of the Fuhrer as a morally upstanding and refined man. Author Despina Stratigakos also reveals the previously untold story of Hitler's interior designer, Gerdy Troost, through newly discovered archival sources. At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler's homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler's domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book's rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler's homes and into the sheer power of the propaganda that influenced how the world saw him.

Thomas McGann Memorial Prize, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 2017 Runner-up, Humanities Book Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association, 2018 In the wake of Mexico's revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. Picturing the Proletariat examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists' collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. Showcasing forgotten works and neglected media, John Lear explores how artists and labor unions participated in a cycle of revolutionary transformation from 1908 through the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940). Lear shows how middle-class artists, radicalized by the revolution and the Communist Party, fortified the legacy of the prerevolutionary print artisan Jose Guadalupe Posada by incorporating modernist, avant-garde, and nationalist elements in ways that supported and challenged unions and the state. By 1940, the state undermined the autonomy of radical artists and unions, while preserving the image of both as partners of the "institutionalized revolution." This interdisciplinary book explores the gendered representations of workers; the interplay of prints, photographs, and murals in journals, in posters, and on walls; the role of labor leaders; and the discursive impact of the Spanish Civil War. It considers "los tres grandes"-Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco-while featuring lesser-known artists and their collectives, including Saturnino Herran, Leopoldo Mendez, Santos Balmori, and the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR). The result is a new perspective on the art and politics of the revolution.

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.

Eye on a Century celebrates a cornerstone of the Yale University Art Gallery's holdings: the Charles B. Benenson Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. This major bequest includes works by a veritable pantheon of modern and contemporary artists-among them Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stuart Davis, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, James Rosenquist, and David Smith. The catalogue provides exciting new scholarship on some of the collection's most significant objects, including works by Alexander Calder, Kurt Schwitters, and Pablo Picasso, alongside lesser-known works, by artists such as Alicia Penalba, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong, several of which have never before been published. The introduction, which examines the context of Benenson's collecting, is followed by more than fifty catalogue entries and an illustrated checklist of the complete collection. Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery

This book is dedicated to the great Georgian modern artist David Kakabadze (1889-1952). This book compares the importance of David Kakabadze's creative work against the background of world avant-garde art of the beginning of the 20th century. This book is of interest for art historians and other experts, studying Georgian and Soviet art/culture, modern art and, especially, abstract art.

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.

This is an unflinching and honest portrayal of how numerous artists and their works were used during the German occupation of France. "Art of the Defeat" provides an unflinching an honest look at the art scene in France during the German occupation of World War II. Beginning with Adolf Hitler's staging of the armistice at Rethondes, it offers a survey of Nazi and Vichy artistic policies, key events and organizations, and individual acts of collaboration and resistance. It examines the demonization of foreigners, the looting of state museums and Jewish collections, the glorification of Philippe Petain and French national identity, and the official junket by French artists to Germany. Drawing on research and discussions of the works of artists such as Gerard Ambroselli, Arno Breker, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and dozens of others, this volume is a pioneering look at how art can be used to hold despair and defeat at bay.

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.

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.

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.