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'.

With meticulous theories and many thousands of paintings, drawings, and watercolors, Paul Klee (1879-1940) is considered one of the most cerebral and prolific leaders of 20th-century European art. Though typically small in scale, his works are remarkable for their sophisticated thought and meticulous nuances of line, color, and tonality. Klee's stylistic formation was shaped by early affiliation with the German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter and, in particular, by a 1914 trip to Tunisia which transformed his use of color. After the war, he taught at the esteemed Bauhaus school, where his lectures, like his emerging practice, emphasized the symbolic potential of shade, line, and geometry. Klee was also inspired by Cubism, poetry, music, literature, language, and the simplistic power of children's art. Famed for his simple stick figures, he often combined the appearance of untutored naivete with rigorous composition and intellectual significance. This book provides a selection of key Klee works to introduce his style and influence. From sun-drenched landscapes to enigmatic wordplay, discover a world at once simplistic, symbolic, and dazzlingly colorful. 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

Dolores Soldevilla Nieto was a passionate Cuban artist whose career blossomed in the 1950s. Following early professional turns, she emerged later in life as a prolific artist and fervent advocate for culture. She became Cuba's cultural attache to Europe, embarking on a path that would dramatically alter the course of her life and the discourse surrounding Cuban abstraction at mid-century. Residing in Paris, she studied in the ateliers of prominent European and American artists, and, after returning to Cuba, she played an active role as a vital link between the European avant-garde and the new voices of abstraction emerging throughout Latin America and Cuba. Lolo Soldevilla: Constructing Her Universe is the first monograph devoted to her remarkable achievements, providing compelling insight into the life and work of this exceptional artist.

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.

By retracing Frank Lloyd Wright's footsteps on journeys he made beyond his homeland of the USA, this book explores his global ambitions and his lasting legacy and offers an original and contemporary view of Wright and his architecture. While Lloyd Wright is perceived as the quintessential American architect, in fact he was well-travelled, and these six journeys were to develop and promote his globalising 'organic' philosophy. The author takes off first to Japan and Germany to explore the way Wright's visits to these countries informed and framed his 'Prairie House' period. He then travels to Russia and the UK, where Wright presented his global 'Usonian' manifesto. The final two chapters pursue Wright to Italy and the Middle East as part of his 'Legacy' period. The book is beautifully illustrated with Wright's own sketches and photographs, as well as some historical photographs of Wright's original journeys and works. The author meets people who are living and coping with Wright's 'organic' architecture today and asks them whether their homes are still true to Wright's intent or whether there is something else that made their home particular.By considering Wright beyond America, his architecture is critiqued against different cultural settings so that it can be evaluated as emerging from a new globalised era of architectural production. The author reflects on Frank Lloyd Wright as an early promoter of globalisation - in fact, as the first 'global architect'.

Frederick Arthur Farrell (1882-1935) came from a distinguished Glasgow family. He initially studied civil engineering, and as an artist was self-taught, although he owes a debt to the advice and example of Muirhead Bone. By the outbreak of World War I he was developing a reputation as an up-and-coming etcher and watercolourist of portraits and topographical subjects. He enlisted as a sapper, or military engineer, with the Royal Engineers Railway Troops Depot but was discharged from the Army due to ill health. In December 1916, Farrell returned to the Front as a war artist, attached for three weeks to the 15th, 16th and 17th Highland Light Infantry in Flanders. In November 1917 he was in France, attached for two months to the staff of the 51st (Highland) Division. In between, authorized by the Minister of Munitions and Admiralty, and supported by Glasgow's Lord Provost, Farrell drew the heroic home effort of women in Glasgow's munitions factories, shipyards and engineering works. As a former soldier, Farrell's sketches and watercolours of the Front powerfully offer a landscape filtered through personal experience and emotion. Battle scenes and strategic deliberations are reconstructed, informed by first-hand accounts. Many include portraits of actual soldiers. There are poignant images of graves, devastated landscapes and destroyed churches. However, there are also scenes of reconstruction and renewed activity amid the desolation. He is at his most dynamic in his drawings of the munitions factories which are full of noise, light and movement. In these there is a sense of joy and energy in industry and machinery, in patterning and design. The commission Farrell received from the Corporation of Glasgow to produce 50 drawings of the front line and munitions factories in the city to record the war for posterity was extraordinary. He was unique in being the only war artist to be commissioned by a city rather than by the government, Imperial War Museum or armed forces. Glasgow was one of the first cities to recognize the importance of creating such a memorial, rather than just creating images for propaganda purposes.

Alberto Giacometti's attenuated figures of the human form are among the most significant artistic images of the 20th century. Sartre, Breton, and Winnicott are just some of the great thinkers who have drawn upon the graceful, harrowing work of Giacometti, which has continued to resonate with artists, writers, and audiences. In this book, Timothy Mathews explores the themes of fragility, trauma, space, and relationality in Giacometti's art and the texts that respond or refer to them: the novels of W.G. Sebald, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom, and the theories of Bertolt Brecht, which recasts the iconic L'Homme qui marche as Walter Benjamin's Angel of History. During his lifelong quest to represent the human form, and to locate the humanity at the heart of conflicting conceptions of modernity, Giacometti returned to the key notions of depth and flatness, memory and attachment, through his sculptures and writings. Both a critical study of Giacometti's life and work, and an investigation of their affective power, this book asks what encounters with Giacometti's pieces can tell us about the history of our own time, and our ways of looking; about the nature of human attachment, and the humility of relating to art.

Themes of the American West have been enduringly popular, and The American West in Bronze features sixty-five iconic bronzes that display a range of subjects, from portrayals of the noble Indian to rough-and-tumble scenes of rowdy cowboys to tributes to the pioneers who settled the lands west of the Mississippi. Fascinating texts offer a fresh look at the roles that artists played in creating interpretations of the "vanishing West"-whether based on fact, fiction, or something in-between. These artists, including Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington, embody a range of life experiences and artistic approaches. Some grew up in the West and based their artwork on first-hand experience, while others never set foot west of the Rockies. Four thematic sections-Indians, animals, cowboys, and settlers-are illustrated with new photography and provide a cultural overview to the works presented. Also included are biographies of the artists, each illustrated with a vintage portrait, plus an illustrated chronology of historical and artistic events. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (12/17/13-04/13/14) Denver Art Museum (05/09/14-08/31/14) Nanjing Museum (October 2014-January 2015)

Georgia O'Keeffe, a superbly gifted American artist usually associated with New Mexico, spent nearly four years in Texas, most of them in the Panhandle. She taught art in the public schools of Amarillo for two years, 1912-1914, and headed the art department at West Texas Normal College (now West Texas A & M University) in Canyon from the fall of 1916 to early 1918. She then went for a few months to Waring, Texas, northwest of San Antonio.There are scores of books on Georgia O'Keeffe. The books are of various lengths, covering her life, art, and influence on other artists; her time spent in New Mexico; and her relationship with and marriage to Alfred Stieglitz. By comparison, however, there is little on O'Keeffe's years in Texas. Georgia O'Keeffe in Texas: A Guide is different from previous O'Keeffe studies, as it provides a short biography of O'Keeffe on the people and events that influenced her Texas years. The authors are neither artists nor professional art critics, but are historians of the American West who have an interest in Georgia O'Keeffe. They believe her years in Texas, especially the Texas Panhandle, were significant for her subsequent development as a thoroughly modern American artist. This book is designed to work as a guide to O'Keeffe's life and work in Texas, and reveals an even more fascinating figure in the process.Front Cover Art Credit: Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas

As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions of rape and incest and to shift the dominant narrative of violence against women. In this dynamic book, Vivien Green Fryd charts this decades-long radical intervention through an art-historical lens. Fryd shows how American artists such as Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz, Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, and Kara Walker insisted on ending the silence surrounding sexual violence and helped construct an anti-rape, anti-incest counternarrative that remains vibrant today. She looks at how second-wave feminist artists established and reiterated the importance of addressing sexual violence against women and how their successors in the third wave then framed their works within that visual and rhetorical tradition. Throughout, Fryd highlights specific themes-rape and incest against white and black female bodies, rape against white and black male bodies, rape and pornography-that intersect with other challenges to and critiques of the sociocultural and political patriarchy from the 1970s through the present day. Featuring dozens of illustrative works and written by an art historian who is a scholar of PTSD and herself a survivor, this groundbreaking and timely project explores sexual violence as a discrete subject of American art with open eyes and unflinching analysis. Against Our Will challenges the reader to serve as witness to the trauma in much the same way as the works Fryd studies.

The highly anticipated, definitive reference on Stuart Davis's paintings, watercolors, drawings, and published illustrations Stuart Davis (1892-1964) made a mark on the art world early in his career, first with his Ashcan works and then with his highly personal version of Cubism, which firmly established American modernism as a force that could rival its European counterpart. Over the course of six decades, Davis produced artworks that drew inspiration from the European modernists but were deeply rooted in the popular culture of the United States. Jazz music and hipster talk, vaudeville stages, city streetscapes, New England fishing villages, gasoline stations, store fronts, and commercial packaging and advertising images were among the sources that infused his art with energy, bringing crisp edges, radiant color, and syncopated rhythms to a vast body of paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Documenting the life's work of this prolific and highly influential artist-who affected almost every development in American art from second-generation Ashcan realism around 1912 to color field and geometric painting in the 1960s-is a monumental achievement. In these three volumes, the editors have catalogued 1,749 artworks by the artist-including more than 600 works never previously illustrated-providing extensive documentation and information about each one. A detailed chronology of Davis's life, as well as an enlightening discussion of the compositional relationship between certain works spanning his oeuvre, rounds out this study. Exquisitely designed and produced, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonne will be the definitive reference on the artist's work for many years to come. Published in association with the Yale University Art Gallery

Les collections d'&#156uvres d'art racontent des histoires qui refletent les interets du collectionneur et de son epoque. Chefs-d'&#156uvre de la Galerie d'art Beaverbrook relate la vie rocambolesque de sir William Maxwell (Max) Aitken, aussi connu sous le nom de lord Beaverbrook, magnat de la presse multimillionnaire, editeur de journaux arrogant, habile politicien, maitre de la propagande, auteur et grand philanthrope.

En 1959, sir Max Aitken inaugure a Fredericton, au Nouveau-Brunswick, la Galerie d'art Beaverbrook pour abriter une collection exemplaire de tableaux. Constitue par lord Beaverbrook lui-meme et son entourage de conservateurs et de collegues, ce noyau initial d'&#156uvres deviendra l'une des plus belles et des plus importantes collections d'art britannique en Amerique du Nord. Il comprend notamment des &#156uvres de J.M.W. Turner, Lucian Freud, Graham Sutherland et Walter Sickert, ainsi que des tableaux representatifs de Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, John Singleton Copley, Eugene Delacroix, Joshua Reynolds et Salvador Dali, qui temoignent du caractere distinctif et de la qualite de la remarquable collection de la Galerie.

Ces &#156uvres importantes sont reunies pour la premiere fois dans cette publication luxueuse comprenant plus de 75 reproductions en couleur, ainsi que des essais sur l'histoire de la collection et les chefs-d'&#156uvre, signes par six critiques renommes?: Elliott H. King, historien de l'art et specialiste de Dali; James Hamilton, auteur de "Turner: A Life"; Richard Calvocoressi, directeur de la fondation Henry Moore; l'auteur et conservateur Angus Stewart; l'historienne de l'art Katharine Eustace; ainsi que Terry Graff, conservateur de la Galerie d'art Beaverbrook et principal auteur de cet ouvrage.

Pour clore l'ouvrage, le journaliste Marty Klinkenberg et le directeur general de la Galerie d'art Beaverbrook, Bernard Riordon, retracent les peripeties du differend opposant le musee et les deux fondations Beaverbrook.

With his Boite-en-valise, or Museum in a Box, Duchamp embarked on one of his more ambitious projects: a portable museum of miniature replicas and facsimiles created with the help of elaborate reproduction techniques as pochoir (a type of hand stencilling) and comprising his most important works. Conceived in the mid-1930s and consisting of eighty-one items, it was first released in 1941 and continued to be assembled in various editions until after his death, with the final seven different series totalling about 300 items. This publication is a facsimile of the series D, 1961 edition. Created with the full approval of the Duchamp Estate, it contains a reproduction of The Large Glass on Plexiglas, colour reproductions of his pictures, reproductions of his drawings and a selection of his humorous texts, a glass vial of Parisian air, a urinal, a small sugar dispenser, 'canned chance' and other miscellanea, all housed in a green cardboard box.

This anthology outlines a strong vitalistic movement in Denmark with considerably broader dimensions than has previously been recognised. The contributions examine a number of art-historical perspectives ranging from sports and dance motifs, the cultivation of the healthy and athletic body to the vibrant landscapes framing ideal outdoor life for men, women and children. Vitalism's prismatic nature is traced across a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, music, dance, literature and architecture. Additionally, the volume highlights the prevalence of the interest in health, beauty and strength in the culture of everyday life during the period 1890-1940: exemplified, for example, by the reintroduction of the Olympic Games in 1896, the emergence of a vast number of sports clubs, and an increased attentiveness to hygiene and nutrition. Although the Vitalistic themes emanated from modern life, they also drew artistic sustenance from Nordic mythology and Greek antiquity, which served as the most important ideals in the modern pursuit of both physical and spiritual beauty.