The architect and theorist Walter Behrendt was involved with public housing and urban development as a designer and administrator for the German government after World War I. From 1925 to 1926 he edited the journal Die Form for the German Werkbund and led an articulate and well-orchestrated campaign in support of the Modern Movement. A friend and colleague of Lewis Mumford, he immigrated in 1934 to the United States where he taught courses on city planning and housing at Dartmouth College and the University of Buffalo.
This book--Behrendt's principle theoretical work in German and the precursor to Modern Building--presents a revisionist concept of style that places equal emphasis on form and function. Here, Behrendt calls for architects to return to basic geometries and to articulate explicitly the new social and economic realities. Now available in English for the first time, this incisive treatise boldly advocates international modernism to the general public.

Modernism is usually thought of as a shock wave of innovations hitting art, architecture, music, cinema and literature - the work of Picasso, Joyce, Schoenberg, movements like Futurism and Dada, the architecture of Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and the avant-garde theatre of Bertolt Brecht or Samuel Beckett. But what really defines modernism? Why did it begin and how long did it last? Is Modernism over now? Chris Rodriguez and Chris Garratt's brilliant graphic guide is a brilliant exploration of the last century's most thrilling artistic work - and what it's really all about.

Shine allures and awakens desire. As a phenomenon of perception shiny things and materials fascinate and tantalize. They are a formative element of material culture, promising luxury, social distinction and the hope of limitless experience and excess. Since the early twentieth century the mass production, dissemination and popularization of synthetic materials that produce heretofore-unknown effects of shine have increased. At the same time, shine is subjectified as "glamor" and made into a token of performative self-empowerment. The volume illuminates genealogical as well as systematic relationships between material phenomena of shine and cultural-philosophical concepts of appearance, illusion, distraction and glare in bringing together renowned scholars from various disciplines.

Bauhaus Imaginista is a major international project marking the centenary of this fascinating and popular school, which championed the idea of artists working together as a community. The Bauhaus reconnected art with everyday life, and was active in the fields of architecture, performance, design and visual art. Its original teachers included such renowned figures as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. Placing a rare emphasis on the international dissemination and reception of the Bauhaus, this book accompanies a touring exhibition, and presents four chapters that extend from Bauhaus education to the school's diverse history beyond Europe. Rethinking the Bauhaus school from a global perspective, it sets the school's entanglements against a century of geopolitical change. The reader is taken to art and design museums, campus galleries and art institutes in India, Japan, China, Russia, Brazil and the United States, as well as Berlin.

This book complements the more textually-based Bauhaus scholarship with a practice-oriented and creative interpretive method, which makes it possible to consider Bauhaus-related works in an unconventional light. Edit Toth argues that focusing on the functionalist approach of the Bauhaus has hindered scholars from properly understanding its design work. With a global scope and under-studied topics, the book advances current scholarly discussions concerning the relationship between image technologies and the body by calling attention to the materiality of image production and strategies of re-channeling image culture into material processes and physical body space, the space of dimensionality and everyday activity.

South African artist Irma Stern (1894-1966) is one of the nation's most enigmatic modern figures. Stern held conservative political positions on race even as her subjects openly challenged racism and later the apartheid regime. Using paintings, archival research, and new interviews, this book explores how Stern became South Africa's most prolific painter of Black, Jewish, and Colored (mixed-race) life while maintaining controversial positions on race. Through her art, Stern played a crucial role in both the development of modernism in South Africa and in defining modernism as a global movement. Spanning the Boer War to Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and into the contemporary #RhodesMustFall movement, Irma Stern's work documents important twentieth-century cultural and political moments. More than fifty years after her death, Stern's legacy challenges assumptions about race, gender roles, and religious identity and how they are represented in art history.

Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus School had an enormous impact on the arts and everyday life. Fifty of the most representative pieces of Bauhaus art and design are presented here in illuminating and engrossing two-page spreads. This book selects the artists, buildings, furniture pieces, theatrical productions, toys, and textiles that epitomize the Bauhaus ideal of uniting form and function. Artists such as Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Joost Schmidt are featured along with lesser-known but equally important designers and artists. Anyone interested in the history and accomplishments of the Bauhaus will find much to learn and enjoy in this unique compilation that reveals the movement's range as well as its influence on today's artistic practices.

These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretical importance between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in England and Germany. Ranging from Owen Jones to Ernst Gombrich through Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Loos, Henry van de Velde, and Hermann Muthesius, the contributors show how artistic theories are deeply related to the art practice of their own times, and how ornament is imbued with historical and social meaning.

The First World War mangled faces, blew away limbs, and ruined nerves. Ten million dead, twenty million severe casualties, and eight million people with permanent disabilities--modern war inflicted pain and suffering with unsparing, mechanical efficiency. However, such horror was not the entire story. People also rebuilt their lives, their communities, and their bodies. From the ashes of war rose beauty, eroticism, and the promise of utopia.
Ana Carden-Coyne investigates the cultures of resilience and the institutions of reconstruction in Britain, Australia, and the United States. Immersed in efforts to heal the consequences of violence and triumph over adversity, reconstruction inspired politicians, professionals, and individuals to transform themselves and their societies.
Bodies were not to remain locked away as tortured memories. Instead, they became the subjects of outspoken debate, the objects of rehabilitation, and commodities of desire in global industries. Governments, physicians, beauty and body therapists, monument designers and visual artists looked to classicism and modernism as the tools for rebuilding civilization and its citizens. What better response to loss of life, limb, and mind than a body reconstructed?

"I have learned profoundly from Nathan Glazer's cultural perspectives and deep insights, engaging the extraordinary and the ordinary. "From a Cause to a Style" is a work I consider most relevant and significant for our time via its all-encompassing range and its richness of detail involving multiple urban, architectural, technical, and social issues-recent, current, and future."--Robert Venturi, architect and author

"This collection is a reminder that in addition to being an urban sociologist, an astute commentator on social issues, and a public intellectual, Nathan Glazer is an insightful and provocative architecture critic."--Witold Rybczynski, author of "Home: A Short History of an Idea"

"Nathan Glazer stands in the grand but fragile American tradition of the humanist architectural critic. He is also one of our great complexifiers. Whether he is writing about cities, streets, public spaces, or particular buildings, he notices things that seem to escape the attention of the professional--though not always of the general public. To read him is to become aware of one's own architectural experience, and to begin thinking hard about how it might be improved."--Mark Lilla, University of Chicago

"This is a remarkable collection of essays that only Nathan Glazer could write. It sums up and partly explains the inability of contemporary architecture to deal with the problems of modern urbanism and to address many practical issues of building. As Glazer points out, an architectural tradition that identified itself by its capacity to focus the issues of functionalism has ended up by almost totally ignoring them."--Robert Gutman, Lecturer in Architecture, Princeton University

An urban history of modern Britain, and how the built environment shaped the nation's politics Foundations is a history of twentieth-century Britain told through the rise, fall, and reinvention of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate, shopping precinct, council estate, private flats, shopping mall, and suburban office park. Sam Wetherell shows how these spaces transformed Britain's politics, economy, and society, helping forge a midcentury developmental state and shaping the rise of neoliberalism after 1980. From the mid-twentieth century, spectacular new types of urban space were created in order to help remake Britain's economy and society. Government-financed industrial estates laid down infrastructure to entice footloose capitalists to move to depressed regions of the country. Shopping precincts allowed politicians to plan precisely for postwar consumer demand. Public housing modernized domestic life and attempted to create new communities out of erstwhile strangers. In the latter part of the twentieth century many of these spaces were privatized and reimagined as their developmental aims were abandoned. Industrial estates became suburban business parks. State-owned shopping precincts became private shopping malls. The council estate was securitized and enclosed. New types of urban space were imported from American suburbia, and planners and politicians became increasingly skeptical that the built environment could remake society. With the midcentury built environment becoming obsolete, British neoliberalism emerged in tense negotiation with the awkward remains of built spaces that had to be navigated and remade. Taking readers to almost every major British city as well as to places in the United States and Britain's empire, Foundations highlights how some of the major transformations of twentieth-century British history were forged in the everyday spaces where people lived, worked, and shopped.

'The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle's Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it.' Edmund de Waal The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Christopher Wood, Barbara Hepworth, David Jones, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line. Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life. In this captivating, lively and deeply researched biography, Laura Freeman reveals the life of a man who helped shape twentieth-century British art, and sheds new light on the rare beauty and character of his greatest creation, Kettle's Yard.

Through archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York. From the urban street level of music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book redraws the map of experimental art to reveal the imperial dynamics and citizenship struggles that continue to shape music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years, Brigid Cohen looks at a wide range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Edgard Varese, Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity. Cohen links them with other migrant creators vital to the city's postwar culture boom, creators whose stories have seldom been told (Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Vladimir Ussachevsky). She also gives sustained and serious treatment to the work of Yoko Ono, something long overdue in music scholarship. Musical Migration and Imperial New York is indispensable reading, offering a new understanding of global avant-gardes and American experimental music as well as the contrasting feelings of belonging and exclusion on which they were built.

Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond presents an extraordinary new Australasian cultural history. It is a migrant and refugee story: from 1930, the arrival of so many emigre, internee and refugee educators helped to transform art, architecture and design in Australia and New Zealand. Fifteen thematic essays and twenty individual case studies bring to light a tremendous amount of new archival material in order to show how these innovative educators, exiled from Nazism, introduced Bauhaus ideas and models to a new world.

Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers are seen by many as icons of Western European art. Two of these masterpieces - the first version painted in August 1888 (The National Gallery, London) and the painting made after it in January 1889 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) - have been the subject of a detailed comparison by an interdisciplinary team of experts. The pictures were examined in unprecedented depth using a broad array of techniques, including state-of-the-art, non-invasive imaging analytical methods, to look closely at and under the paint surface. Not only the making, but also the subsequent history of the works was reconstructed, including later campaigns of restoration. The study's conclusions are set out in this book, along with the fascinating genesis of the paintings and the sunflower's special significance to Van Gogh. More than 30 authors, all specialists in the field of conservation, conservation science and art history, have contributed to the research and publication presenting the outcomes of this unique project.

In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus School of Art and Design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, sculpture to ceramics. This book is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum fur Gestaltung in Berlin, the world's largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 550 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a "total" work of art. As we approach the Bauhaus centennial, this is a defining account of its energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Lilly Reich.

Focusing on literature and visual art in the years 1910-1935, Modernist Fraud begins with the omnipresent accusations that modernism was not art at all, but rather an effort to pass off patently absurd works as great art. These assertions, common in the time's journalism, are used to understand the aesthetic and context which spawned them, and to look at what followed in their wake. Fraud discourse ventured into the aesthetic theory of the time, to ideas of artistic sincerity, formalism, and the intentional fallacy. In doing so, it profoundly shaped the modern canon and its justifying principles. Modernist Fraud explores a wide range of materials. It draws on reviews and newspaper accounts of art scandals, such as the 1913 Armory Show, the 1910 and 1912 Postimpressionist shows, and Tender Buttons; to daily syndicated columns; to parodies and doggerel; to actual hoaxes, such as Spectra and Disumbrationism; to the literary criticism of Edith Sitwell; to the trial of Brancusi's Bird in Space; and to the contents of the magazine Blind Man, including a defense of Duchamp's Fountain, a poem by Bill Brown, and the works of, and an interview with, the bafflingly unstable painter Louis Eilshemius. In turning to these materials, the book reevaluates how modernism interacted with the public and describes how a new aesthetic begins: not as a triumphant explosion that initiates irrevocable changes, but as an uncertain muddling and struggle with ideology.

The production of this book stems from two of the editors' longstanding research interests: the representation of architecture in print media, and the complex identity of the second phase of modernism in architecture given the role it played in postwar reconstruction in Europe. While the history of postwar reconstruction has been increasingly well covered for most European countries, research investigating postwar architectural magazines and journals across Europe - their role in the discourse and production of the built environment and particularly their inter-relationship and differing conceptions of postwar architecture - is relatively undeveloped. Modernism and the Professional Architecture Journal sounds out this territory in a new collection of essays concerning the second phase of the reception and assimilation of modernism in architecture, as it was represented in professional architecture journals during the period of postwar reconstruction (1945-1968). Professional architecture journals are often seen as conduits of established facts and knowledge. The role mainstream publications play, however, in establishing 'movements', 'trends' or 'debates' tends to be undervalued. In the context of the complex undertaking of postwar reconstruction, the shortage of resources, political uncertainty and the biographical complexities of individual architects, the chapters on key European architecture journals collected here reveal how modernist architecture, and its discourse, was perceived and disseminated in different European countries.

The Bauhaus, the legendary school in Dessau, Germany, transformed architecture and design around the world. This book broke new ground when first published in 1991 by introducing psychoanalysis, geometry, early childhood education, and popular culture into the standard political history of the Bauhaus. The ABC's of Triangle, Square, Circle also introduced two young designers, Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, whose multidisciplinary approach changed the field of design writing and research. With a new preface by Lupton and Miller, this collection of visually and intellectually stimulating essays is a must-read for educators and students.