The Impressionists are world renowned for their vibrant depictions of the atmospheric effects and shimmering beauty of the French countryside. These paintings, often produced in Paris, found an enthusiastic market in the city. The inhabitants of that hub of modernity had an apparently paradoxical interest in the mythologies of rural living. As the city became more and more the motive force of social change so the country was understood as the anchor of changelessness and nostalgia. The essayists in this volume examine the complex relationship between country and city. Their work draws widely on the contemporary culture exploring folklore and children's literature, anarchism and urbanism, and offers significant new insights into the work of major artists and writers including Courbet, Millet, Monet, Van Gogh and Zola.

Award-winning urban sketcher and best-selling author Stephanie Bower presents a spectacular, all-new collection of sketchers and their art from 39 countries in a city-to-city tour around the world. The remarkable work of the vibrant, international urban sketching community was first documented in The Art of Urban Sketching by Gabriel Campanario. In the ten years since its release, sketching on location has grown into nothing less than a worldwide phenomenon. A visual feast of more than 700 images from over 150 sketchers, The World of Urban Sketching unveils the latest developments and innovations in the creative and rewarding pursuit of on-location drawing and painting. New Artwork. Discover the stunning and informative work of both established and emerging urban sketchers, from Seattle to Santiago, from Singapore to Sydney. New Techniques. Consider new styles and approaches in color and linework, including digital, through artists' tips and step-by-step demonstrations. New Stories. Learn what inspires sketchers, even during a pandemic, and get invaluable insights into creating artwork on location through artists' observations and advice. Whether you draw during your travels or in your own backyard, the beautiful work in The World of Urban Sketching will expand your skills and inspire you to pick up a pencil and sketch your world!

An important resource for scholars of contemporary art and architecture, this volume considers contemporary art that takes architecture as its subject. Concentrated on works made since 1990, Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility is the first to take up this topic in a sustained and explicit manner and the first to advance the idea that contemporary art functions as a form of architectural history, theory, and analysis. Over the course of fourteen essays by both emerging and established scholars, this volume examines a diverse group of artists in conjunction with the vernacular, canonical, and fantastical structures engaged by their work. Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Matthew Barney, Monika Sosnowska, Pipo Nguyen-duy, and Paul Pfeiffer are among those considered, as are the compelling questions of architecture's relationship to photography, the evolving legacy of Mies van der Rohe, the notion of an architectural unconscious, and the provocative concepts of the unbuilt and the unbuildable. Through a rigorous investigation of these issues, Contemporary Art About Architecture calls attention to the fact that art is now a vital form of architectural discourse. Indeed, this phenomenon is both pervasive and, in its individual incarnations, compelling - a reason to think again about the entangled histories of architecture and art.

High above the pleasure palaces of the French Riviera is the Alpine Extension of the Maginot Line. These little-known bunkers were built in the 1930s to protect against Mussolini. But things didn't quite turn out at the French expected . . . Now, they are marooned and crumbling in some of the most beautiful, remote parts of the Alps. They are disappearing into the landscapes they once commanded, stray facts from a future passed, still waiting for an onslaught that never came. Bunker Research is for adventurers, architects, historians, mountain lovers and urban explorers. Follow this disquieting journey, told in stunning photos and prose, up peaks, along ridges and down valleys, searching for the hidden history of modernism in the mountains. The second edition follows the long-sold-out limited first printing, which won 'Best Self-Published Book' at the British Book Design & Production Awards 2016. If features 10 pages of new photos.

"Re""-""Imagining the City: Art, Globalization, and Urban Spaces "examines how contemporary processes of globalization are transforming cultural experience and production in urban spaces. It maps how cultural productions in art, architecture, and communications media are contributing to the reimagining of place and identity through events, artifacts, and attitudes. This book recasts how we understand cities--how knowledge can be formed, framed, and transferred through cultural production and how that knowledge is mediated through the construction of aesthetic meaning and value.

This book is based on the artwork of Sue Jane Taylor. She is no stranger to extreme working environments, having worked for over thirty years recording the lives of workers in the North Sea oil industry on sites such as Piper Alpha, Piper B, Forties platforms and recently Murchison in the Northern Seas. Her work now extends to the offshore renewable energy industry. The book brings a unique perspective to the relationship between art, environment and industry while revealing a relatively alien way of life on board a North Sea oil platform. Among other themes it will consider the future of energy in Scotland. The book has an introductory essay by Elsa Cox, Senior Curator of Technology at National Museums Scotland, illustrated by relevant objects from the collections in the National Museum. This is followed by Sue Jane Taylor's artwork, with extended captions.

"Unmapping the City, " the first title in the new Intellect series Critical Photography, features photographs shot between 2004 and 2008 in different cities around the world. The images are linked by their shared attempts to define a two-dimensional approach to a three-dimensional built reality, and to address spatial representation, ritual, and urbanity through art. In representing the cityscape through a flat texture of lines and bold colors, the reader is drawn into a conversation about the interplay between reality and its representation. This volume significantly challenges and expands the critical discourse on photography and text and will be of interest to artists, curators, photographers, architects, and critical theorists.

Cities provide endless exciting scenes for the artist, from sun-baked cafes, rain-soaked streets, illuminated nightscapes and busy squares to quiet, atmospheric corners. This practical book explains how to paint these scenes using water-based painting materials and new techniques. With invaluable tips and advice throughout, it encourages a looser, more colourful approach to painting and shares a range of ideas for style and interpretation.

Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750 focuses on coins as material artefacts and agents of meaning in early modern arts. The precious metals, double-sided form, and emblematic character of coins had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. Coins embodied Europe's power and the labour, increasingly located in colonised regions, of extracting gold and silver. Their efficacy depended on faith in their inherent value and the authority perceived to be imprinted into them, guaranteed through the institution of the Mint. Yet they could speak eloquently of illusion, debasement and counterfeiting. A substantial introduction precedes essays by interdisciplinary scholars on five themes: power and authority in the Mint; currency and the anxieties of global trade; coins and persons; coins in and out of circulation; credit and risk. An Afterword on a contemporary artist demonstrates the continuing expressive and symbolic power of numismatic forms.

Representation of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, Vol. 1: Androids, Golems, and Prometheus addresses the way in which artificial intelligence, mechanical anthropoids, Golems, and similar types of robots are represented in contemporary culture. These can be seen both in literature and in the cinema. This book does not seek to define or contain what artificial intelligence is. Rather, it argues our own limitations limit the possibilities and potentials of artificial intelligence. Representation of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, Vol. 1 makes it clear these imaginaries have more to do with what we are as a society and individuals than with the parameters that these creations actually have.

A wide-ranging study of the significance of swords throughout the whole Anglo-Saxon period, offering valuable insights into the meaning of and attitude towards swords. Swords were special in Anglo-Saxon England. Their names, deeds and pedigrees were enshrined in writing. Many were curated for generations, revealed by their worn and mended condition. Few ended their lives as casual discards, placed instead in graves, hoards and watercourses as part of ritualised acts. Contemporary sources leave no doubt that complex social meanings surrounded these weapons, transcending their use on the battlefield; but they have yet to transcend the traditional view that their primary social function was as status symbols. Even now, half a century after the first major study of Anglo-Saxon swords, their wider significance within their world has yet to be fully articulated. This book sets out to meet the challenge. Eschewing modern value judgements, it focuses instead on contemporary perceptions - exploring how those who made, used and experienced swords really felt about them. It takes a multidisciplinary and holistic approach, bringing together insights from art, archaeology and literature. Comparison with Scandinavia adds further nuance, revealing what was (and was not) distinctive of Anglo-Saxon views of these weapons. Far from elite baubles, swords are revealed to have been dynamic "living" artefacts with their own identities, histories and places in social networks - ideas fuelled by their adaptability, durability and unique rolein bloodshed. Sue Brunning is Curator of European Early Medieval Collections at The British Museum.

The unknown and mysterious Great Southland, or Terra Australis, captured the European imagination for centuries before it became a documented fact. This book traces the history of pictorial imagery associated with the 'Fifth Continent'. It discusses and presents imagery from all parts of the southern continent: Java, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, the South Pacific Islands and Tierra del Fuego as it evolved up to the Enlightenment. Many European explorers had a passionate interest in depicting the plants, animals and native inhabitants of the southern world. The images associated with the search for the southern continent - paintings, handcolored maps, drawings, tapestries and artefacts - are discussed in the context of the link between art and exploration. Beautifully illustrated with Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and English images, this book is an exciting visual account of the construction of Terra Australis in the European imagination and as scientific fact.

Trench art is the evocative name given to a dazzling array of objects made from the waste of industrialized war. Each object, whether an engraved shell case, cigarette lighter or a pen made from shrapnel, tells a unique and moving story about its maker. For the first time, this book explores in-depth the history and cultural importance behind these ambiguous art forms. Not only do they symbolize human responses to the atrocities of war, but they also act as mediators between soldiers and civilians, individuals and industrial society, and, most importantly, between the living and the dead. Trench art resonates most obviously with the terror of endless bombardment, night raids, gas attacks and the bestial nature of trench life. It grew in popularity between 1919 and 1939 when the bereaved embarked on battlefield pilgrimages and returned with objects intended to keep alive the memory of loved ones. The term trench art is, however, misleading, as it does not simply refer to materials found in the trenches. It describes a diverse range of objects that have in some way emerged from the experience of war all over the world. Many distinctive objects, for example, were made during conflicts in Bosnia, Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Korea.Surprisingly, trench art predates World War I and it can be made in a number of earlier wars such as the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Boer War. Saunders looks at the broader issues of what is meant by trench art, what it was before the trenches and how it fits in with other art movements, as well as the specific materials used in making it. He suggests that it can be seen as a bridge between the nineteenth century certainties and the fragmentedindustrialized values and ideals of the modern world. This long overdue study offers an original and informative look at one of the most arresting forms of art. Spanning from 1800 to the present day, its analysis of art, human experience, and warfare will pave the way for new research and will be of great interest to cultural and military historians, anthropologists, art historians and collectors.

Trench art is the evocative name given to a dazzling array of objects made from the waste of industrialized war. Each object, whether an engraved shell case, cigarette lighter or a pen made from shrapnel, tells a unique and moving story about its maker. For the first time, this book explores in-depth the history and cultural importance behind these ambiguous art forms. Not only do they symbolize human responses to the atrocities of war, but they also act as mediators between soldiers and civilians, individuals and industrial society, and, most importantly, between the living and the dead. Trench art resonates most obviously with the terror of endless bombardment, night raids, gas attacks and the bestial nature of trench life. It grew in popularity between 1919 and 1939 when the bereaved embarked on battlefield pilgrimages and returned with objects intended to keep alive the memory of loved ones. The term trench art is, however, misleading, as it does not simply refer to materials found in the trenches. It describes a diverse range of objects that have in some way emerged from the experience of war all over the world. Many distinctive objects, for example, were made during conflicts in Bosnia, Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Korea.Surprisingly, trench art predates World War I and it can be made in a number of earlier wars such as the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Boer War. Saunders looks at the broader issues of what is meant by trench art, what it was before the trenches and how it fits in with other art movements, as well as the specific materials used in making it. He suggests that it can be seen as a bridge between the nineteenth century certainties and the fragmentedindustrialized values and ideals of the modern world. This long overdue study offers an original and informative look at one of the most arresting forms of art. Spanning from 1800 to the present day, its analysis of art, human experience, and warfare will pave the way for new research and will be of great interest to cultural and military historians, anthropologists, art historians and collectors.

While much has been written about how photography serves architecture, this book looks at how fine-art photographers frame constructed space - from cities to single anonymous rooms. It analyses various techniques used and reveals resonances and rhythms found in the photographs as they occur at different scales, times and settings. Photographs become vehicles for thinking about the co-existence between individuals and social groups and their surroundings spaces and settings in the city and the landscape. By considering questions of technique and practice on the one hand, and the formal and aesthetic qualities of photographs on the other, the book opens up new ways of looking at and thinking about architecture and how we relate to our environment.

For the past thirty years, Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has undertaken a photographic examination of the life of cities and the built environment. Each of his series focuses on a different facet of the growth and transformation of the urban landscape-from studies of architectural maquettes to the extraction and use of natural materials such as limestone, as it is quarried via explosive blasts and subsequently incorporated into the construction of new buildings. In particular, Hatakeyama has routinely returned to the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolis, exploring this ever-evolving urban sprawl from both below and above, mapping the growth and expansion of these sites over time. Additional series focus on other forms of human intervention with the landscape and natural materials, including factories and building sites in Japan and abroad. Finally, his most recent photographs of his hometown of Rikuzentakata, a fishing town that was almost completely destroyed by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, are also included-an ongoing series begun almost immediately following the disaster. These photographs hauntingly embody the death and rebirth of the city, manifesting a deeply personal connection to the ongoing intersection of geology, architecture, and time.

Although Antiquity itself has been intensively researched, together with its reception, to date this has largely happened in a compartmentalized fashion. This series presents for the first time an interdisciplinary contextualization of the productive acquisitions and transformations of the arts and sciences of Antiquity in the slow process of the European societies constructing a scientific system and their own cultural identity, a process which started in the Middle Ages and has continued up to the Modern Age. The series is a product of work in the Collaborative Research Centre "Transformations of Antiquity" and the "August Boeckh Centre of Antiquity" at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Their individual projects examine transformational processes on three levels in particular - the constitutive function of Antiquity in the formation of the European knowledge society, the role of Antiquity in the genesis of modern cultural identities and self-constructions, and the forms of reception in art, literature, translation and media.

During the 18th century, the arts of industry encompassed both liberal and mechanical realms--not simply the representation of work in the fine art of painting, but the skills involved in the processes of industry itself. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Celina Fox argues that mechanics and artisans used four principal means to describe and rationalize their work: drawing, model-making, societies, and publications. These four channels, which form the four central themes of this engrossing book, provided the basis for experimentation and invention, for explanation and classification, for validation and authorization, and for promotion and celebration, thus bringing them into the public domain and achieving progress as a true part of the Enlightenment.

In his famous interpretation of Vincent Van Gogh's painting A Pair of Peasant's Shoes (1886), Heidegger argues that shoes tell us all we need to know about the world of the person who walks in them. In the case of Van Gogh's painting, we learn this not through a description of the pair of shoes, nor by a report on how to make shoes, but by looking at the shoes. Heidegger thus gestures towards the power of the visual arts to show us human truths through images of footwear and the feet they conceal or reveal, a power that finds its fullest expression in the cinema. From Chaplin's meal of boots (The Gold Rush, 1925), through Powell and Pressburger's Red Shoes (1948) and Dorothy's ruby slippers (The Wizard of Oz, 1939), to Julia Roberts' pvc thigh-highs (Pretty Woman, 1990), Marty McFly's power-lacing Nikes (Back to the Future, 1985) and the slim, spike-heeled stiletto that graces the poster for The Devil Wears Prada (2006), shoes are not only some of the cinema's most enduring icons; they also serve as characterisations, plot devices, soundtracks, metaphors and philosophical touchpoints. This book anaylses their significnace through a range of approaches drawn from the fields of Film Studies, Philosophy, Cultural History, Fashion, Cultural Studies and Politics.

With The Assembled Human the Museum Folkwang inquires into the ambivalent relationship between humans and machines. It's a conflicted relationship, fluctuating between utopia and nightmare, and it still influences our present time. From the conveyor belt to cybernetics and today's digital revolution, from Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism into the recent present with Ed Atkins, Jon Rafman, Avery Singer, or Anna Uddenberg, the show traces the transformation of technology, presenting a wide panorama of artistic visual worlds: human beings as hybrid creatures, blended with their own self-made machines. Featuring 200 works by 100 artists as well as prolific essays, this extensive catalogue goes in-depth into this highly current issue. Artists: Walter Heinz Allner, Bettina von Arnim, Gerd Arntz, Ed Atkins, Giacomo Balla, Joachim Bandau, Lenora de Barros, Willi Baumeister, Thomas Bayrle, Rudolf Belling, Ella Bergmann-Michel, Renato Bertelli, Umberto Boccioni, Wilhelm Braune, John Cage, Helen Chadwick, Computer Technique Group (CTG), Charles A. Csuri, Mariechen Danz, Fortunato Depero, Walter Dexel, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Charles & Ray Eames, Max Ernst, Alexandra Exter, OEyvind Fahlstroem, Harun Farocki, William Allan Fetter, Otto Fischer, Herbert W. Franke, Carl Grossberg, George Grosz, Richard Hamilton, Barbara Hammer, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Eva Hesse, Lewis Wickes Hine, Heinrich Hoerle, Rebecca Horn, Vilmos Huszar, Boris Ignatowitsch, Fritz Kahn, Wassily Kandinsky, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Friedrich Kiesler, Konrad Klapheck, Jurgen Klauke, Paul Klee, Heinrich Kley, Josh Kline, Iwan Kljun, Gustavs Klucis, Alexander Kluge, Kiki Kogelnik, Germaine Krull, Boris Kudojarow, Helmuth Kurth, Jurgen van Kranenbrock, Maria Lassnig, Fernand Leger, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Roy Lichtenstein, El Lissitzky, Hilary Lloyd, Goshka Macuga, Rene Magritte, Kasimir Malewitsch, Man Ray, Etienne-Jules Marey, Remy Markowitsch, Caroline Mesquita, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Molzahn, Alexei Morgunow, Martin Munkacsi, Eadweard Muybridge, Otto Neurath, Katja Novitskova, ORLAN, Tony Oursler, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Eduardo Paolozzi, Georgi Petrusow, Antoine Pevsner, Walter Pichler, Jon Rafman, Robert Rauschenberg, Timm Rautert, Alexander Rodtschenko, Thomas Ruff, Walter Ruttmann, James Shaffer, Arkadi Schaichet, Xanti Schawinsky, Helmut Schenk, Oskar Schlemmer, Nicolas Schoeffer, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Avery Singer, Stelarc, Friedemann von Stockhausen, Thayaht, Paul Thek, Jean Tinguely, Patrick Tresset, Anna Uddenberg, Andor Weininger, Erwin Wendt, Hugo von Werden, George Widener. Text in English and German.

Kris Fierens (born 1957) uses the character of a preliminary study or a sketch as an enduring thing. Or, in their possibility they imitate the character of a preliminary study. Reality and emotion reach a virtual zero point. The gestures that he makes simply become the 'objets trouves'. The object 'on his own' is never present. It's the included matter that enables him to save his dream. Traces of something that still needs to happen. Of which a disappearing memory can already behold. Text in English and Dutch.

A guide to the wonders of Venice, conveyed by means of an artist's sketchbook Matthew Rice is a long-time observer and illustrator of cities, buildings and all those who inhabit them, with an uncanny ability to express the energy of a place through a few lines of ink and splashes of paint. For years, Venice has been a source of deep creative inspiration for him; and now, in Venice: A Sketchbook Guide, he captures the highlights of this most beguiling of Italian cities. Unsurprisingly, given his abiding passion for architecture, Matthew provides a wealth of information about the 'stones' of Venice, including an illustrated guide to the main building styles of the city - Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Modern - and exemplars of its balconies, bridges and campaniles. Further sections explore the city's sestieri - its six residential quarters - as well as its history, paintings, festivals, wildlife and, not least, its cicchetti and aperitivi. Following the same landscape format as Matthew's real-life sketchbooks, Venice: A Sketchbook Guide will combine enchanting watercolour illustrations with an informed, personal and witty text, and promises to delight all visitors to Venice, armchair or actual.

John Marx's watercolours, first published in the Architectural Review, are a captivating example of an architect's way of thinking. Subtle and quiet they are nonetheless compelling works in how they tackle a sense of place, of inhabiting space and time all the while resonating with the core of one's inner being. There is an existential quality to these watercolours that is rare to be found in this medium. Something akin to the psychologically piercing observational quality of artists like De Chirico or Hopper. As architects strive to communicate their ideas, it is interesting to explore the world of Marx's watercolours as an example of a humane approach to conveying emotional meaning in relation to our environment. Marx's subject matter read like"built landscape" heightening the role of the manmade yet wholly in balance with the natural world. This is a message and sentiment that is perhaps more important than ever to relay to audiences.

Andrea Botto, a photographer and visual artist specializing in large works, uses his shots to describe the stages involved in the demolition of the old Ponte Morandi and the construction of the new infrastructure designed by Renzo Piano. His lens follows each phase of the undertaking with technical expertise and attention to the composition of the image, in a skilful combination of documentary reportage and aesthetic research. Botto has been working for RINA Consulting, the Italian agency supervising both the demolition and the construction of the new bridge, which is set to become a new landmark in Genoa, having been designed by Renzo Piano, one of the most renowned architects in the world. RINA Consulting was selected by the commissioning authority to carry out project management, supervision, quality control, and safety coordination during the execution phase of the project.