In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.

Alexey Shchusev (1873-1949) was one of the most celebrated architects of the Soviet Union, famous for Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow. Not only a gifted designer of many prominent buildings, his career was quite unique and closely intertwined with the turbulent course of Russian and Soviet history. He was one of the very few architects who managed to rise to the top of the architectural hierarchy under the tsars and then to repeat this success under Soviet rule. Already before the Revolution of 1917, Shchusev was an acclaimed Revivalist architect, wellknown for his church designs and Moscow's Kazan Station. In the 1920s, he became a renowned Constructivist. Following the official renunciation of Avant-Garde architecture ordered by Stalin, Shchusev swiftly became an advocate of Socialist Classicism, designing many projects in the dictator's favoured Empire Style in order to satisfy the Stalinist state's needs for monumental representation. Combining a scholarly study of Shchusev's career with stunning photographs this book traces the development of this artistically and politically gifted architect through the architectural and historical changes in the first half of the twentieth century.

The mapping of the history and trajectory of Indian modern art is a project begun only in recent years and included in it is the recovery of lesser known names and moments from under the shadow of a few dominant ones. Within it, its conscience keeper-art criticism-has borne greater neglect and obscurity. One such voice, heard with considerable attention in its time, was that of the Delhi-based art critic K. B. Goel (1930-2018). Active from the late 1950s to the '90s, his career broadly coincided with the modernist period. Active mainly as a reviewer, Goel also wrote lengthy reflective assessments, and his art writings stand out for an interpretative and often theory-based approach that is quite unique to Indian art criticism. Writing on some of the most definitive artists, movements, and styles of twentieth-century Indian art, he bears the distinction of successfully transitioning from his modernist training to theorize on the earliest postmodern developments in Indian art, such as installation art. This annotated volume seeks to bring together Goel's major writings, accompanied by a critical introduction that draws attention to his frameworks, concerns, and methodologies. It has a foreword by the eminent art critic Geeta Kapur.

Between 1932 and 1934, Jose Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

This new account of international modernism explores the complex motivations behind this revolutionary movement and assesses its triumphs and failures. The work of the main architects of the movement such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe is re-examined shedding new light on their roles as acknowledged masters.

Alan Colquhoun explores the evolution of the movement fron Art Nouveau in the 1890s to the megastructures of the 1960s, revealing the often contradictory demands of form, function, social engagement, modernity and tradition.

A dazzling dual portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright and early twentieth-century New York, revealing the city's role in establishing the career of America's most famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) took his first major trip to New York in 1909, fleeing a failed marriage and artistic stagnation. He returned a decade later, his personal life and architectural career again in crisis. Booming 1920s New York served as a refuge, but it also challenged him and resurrected his career. The city connected Wright with important clients and commissions that would harness his creative energy and define his role in modern architecture, even as the stock market crash took its toll on his benefactors. Wright denounced New York as an "unlivable prison" even as he reveled in its culture. The city became an urban foil for Wright's work in the desert and in the "organic architecture" he promoted as an alternative to American Art Deco and the International Style. New York became a major protagonist at the end of Wright's life, as he spent his final years at the Plaza Hotel working on the Guggenheim Museum, the building that would cement his legacy. Anthony Alofsin has broken new ground by mining the recently opened Wright archives held by Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art. His foundational research provides a crucial and innovative understanding of Wright's life, his career, and the conditions that enabled his success. The result is at once a stunning biography and a glittering portrait of early twentieth-century Manhattan.

In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression-the art collection, the anthology, and the archive-and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States. Using extensive archival research, Braddock's study synthetically examines the overlooked practices of major American art collectors and literary editors: Albert Barnes, Alain Locke, Duncan Phillips, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Dreier, and Carl Van Vechten. He reveals the way collections were devised as both models for modernism's future institutionalization and culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves. Rather than anchoring his study in the familiar figures of the individual poet, artist, and work, Braddock gives us an entirely new account of how modernism was made, one centered on the figure of the collector and the practice of collecting. Collecting as Modernist Practice demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Braddock has us revisit the contested terrain of modernist culture prior to the dominance of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the university curriculum so that we might consider modernisms that could have been. Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock convincingly shows how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States.

John Heskett wants to transform the way we think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal, and the car we drive to work in, to the medical equipment used to save lives. Design combines 'need' and 'desire' in the form of a practical object that can also reflect the user's identity and aspirations through its form and decoration. This concise guide to contemporary design goes beyond style and taste to look at how different cultures and individuals personalize objects. Heskett also reveals how simple objects, such as a toothpick, can have their design modified to suit the specific cultural behaviour in different countries. There are also fascinating insights into how major companies such as Nokia, Ford, and Sony approach design. Finally, the author gives us an exciting vision of what design can offer us in the future, showing in particular how it can humanize new technology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This volume situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) at the centre of the early post-war American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson's work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson's published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early post-war American modernism. The development of Olson's work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage, Charles Olson and American Modernism offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of post-war American modernism.

For a long time only slightly noticed, modernist movements in Chinese art history are gaining more and more recognition. One of its key fi gures is Ting Yin Yung, whose art is essential to understanding Western-style art in China. Ting was one of the fi rst to turn to his own cultural history to inform the Western-style paintings he and others aspired to master, primarily to breathe life into what many considered a stagnant art tradition. It is difficult to gauge the full extent of Ting's impact and influence on modern and contemporary Chinese art, but this comprehensive catalogue raisonne of his oil paintings brings us in a position to see how his vision, through both his art and his teachings, inspired and nurtured many.

The Art of Football is a singular look at early college football art and illustrations. This collection contains more than two hundred images, many rare or previously unpublished, from a variety of sources, including artists Winslow Homer, Edward Penfield, J. C. Leyendecker, Frederic Remington, Charles Dana Gibson, George Bellows, and many others. Along with the rich art that captured the essence of football during its early period, Michael Oriard provides a historical context for the images and for football during this period, showing that from the beginning it was perceived more as a test of courage and training in manliness than simply an athletic endeavor. Oriard's analysis shows how these early artists had to work out for themselves-and for readers-what in the new game should be highlighted and how it should appear on the page or canvas. The Art of Football takes modern readers back to the day when players themselves were new to the sport, and illustrators had to show the public what the new game of football was. Oriard demonstrates how artists focused on football's dual nature as a grueling sport to be played and as a social event and spectacle to be watched. Through its illustrations and words The Art of Football gives readers an engaging look at the earliest depictions of the game and the origins of the United States as a football nation.

9 lectures in various cities, April 1915-June 1920 (CW 288) The planning, construction, and execution of the functional work of art that was the First Goetheanum was an endeavor that occupied Rudolf Steiner for the better part of seven years. Every detail, from the seemingly small--such as the shape and feel of the door handles--to the grand motifs of the paintings on the ceilings of the cupolas and the building's intended sculptural centerpiece, was lovingly designed to meet and inspire the individual human beings who would some day encounter it, not with didactic symbolism, but with the transparent reality of the spiritual foundation of humanity and the world, and the open possibility to both know this spiritual foundation and to work with it practically and artistically for the good of all. The lectures in this volume--accompanied by reproductions of more than a hundred slides--were heard by various audiences as the building neared completion and before it was destroyed by fire. The text is complemented with a foreword by the esteemed architect Douglas J. Cardinal, as well as an important and revelatory Introductory essay by David Adams: "The Form-Function Relationship in Architecture and Nature: Organic and Inorganic Functionalism." This volume of The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner is essential reading for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the artistic motivation of Rudolf Steiner as an artist and architect, while also clearing up many of the misunderstandings that the building and its sculptural and painted components have inevitably given rise to, both then and now. C O N T E N T S Foreword by Douglas J. Cardinal Introduction by David J. Adams: "The Form-Function Relationship in Architecture and Nature: Organic and Inorganic Functionalism" 1. A House for Spiritual Science: The Form of the Building in Dornach 2. Misunderstandings of Spiritual Research and the Building Devoted to It in Dornach 3. Architectural Forms as Cosmic Thoughts and Feelings 4. The Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting of the First Goetheanum (3 lectures) 5. The Hieroglyphics of the Building in Dornach (2 lectures) 6. The Goetheanum in Dornach Appendix: On the Building in Dornach This book is translated from the German edition Architektur, Plastik und Malerei des ersten Goetheanum: Neun Vortrage, gehalten an verschiedenen Orten zwischen dem 10. April 1915 und dem 12. Juni 1920, herausgegeben aufgrund von stenographischen, teilweise von Rudolf Steiner korrigierten Nachschriften.

The extraordinary story of Isokon, a groundbreaking Modernist building in London, and how its network of residents helped shape Modern Britain.

In the mid-1930s, three giants of the international Modern movement, Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, fled Nazi Germany and sought refuge in Hampstead in the most exciting new apartment block in Britain. The Lawn Road Flats, or Isokon building (as it came to be known), was commissioned by the young visionary couple Jack and Molly Pritchard and designed by aspiring architect Wells Coates. Built in 1934 in response to the question `How do we want to live now?' it was England's first modernist apartment building and was hugely influential in pioneering the concept of minimal living. During the mid-1930s and 1940s its flats, bar and dining club became an extraordinary creative nexus for international artists, writers and thinkers. Jack Pritchard employed Gropius, Breuer and Moholy-Nagy in his newly formed Isokon design company and the furniture, architecture and graphic art the three produced for him and other clients during their brief sojourn in pre-war England helped shape Modern Britain.

This book tells the story of the Isokon, from its beginnings to the present day, and fully examines the work, artistic networks and legacy of the Bauhaus artists during their time in Britain. The tales are not just of design and architecture but war, sex, death, espionage and the infamous dinner parties. Isokon resident Agatha Christie features in the book, as does Charlotte Perriand, working for Le Corbusier's practice, who Jack Pritchard commissioned for a pavilion design in 1930.

The book is beautifully illustrated with archive photography much of which is previously unseen and includes the work of photographer and Soviet spy Edith Tudor-Hart, as well as plans and sketches, menus, postcards and letters from the Pritchard family archive.

In Spring 2018, the Isokon building and Breuer, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy were honoured with a Blue Plaque from English Heritage. 2019 marks the centenary of the foundation of the Bauhaus, so the book is a timely celebration of European design.

The captivating tale of the plans and personalities behind one of New York City's most radical and recognizable buildings Considered the crowning achievement of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is often called iconic. But it is in fact iconoclastic, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding metropolis and setting a new standard for the postwar art museum. Commissioned to design the building in 1943 by the museum's founding curator, Baroness Hilla von Rebay, Wright established residence in the Plaza Hotel in order to oversee the project. Over the next 17 years, Wright continuously clashed with his clients over the cost and the design, a conflict that extended to the city of New York and its cultural establishment. Against all odds, Wright held fast to his radical design concept of an inverted ziggurat and spiraling ramp, built with a continuous beam-a shape recalling the form of an hourglass. Construction was only completed in 1959, six months after Wright's death. The building's initial critical response ultimately gave way to near-universal admiration, as it came to be seen as an architectural masterpiece. This essential text, offering a behind-the-scenes story of the Guggenheim along with a careful reading of its architecture, is beautifully illustrated with more than 150 images, including plans, drawings, and rare photographs of the building under construction.

This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948-1951). Although the name stood for the organizers' home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States. This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra's experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, 20th-century modern art, avant-garde arts, and European history.

In 1930 pioneering female gallerist Lucy Wertheim opened The Wertheim Gallery in London. Wertheim challenged the established art scene conventions; she was a woman without formal art training, driven by intuition and a belief that young British artists should have the same opportunities as their European counterparts. Adventure in Art is Lucy's 1947 autobiography, telling the story of her career in the British Modernist era. Republished by Unicorn to coincide with the forthcoming Towner Eastbourne exhibition, A Life in Art: Lucy Wertheim & Reuniting the Twenties Group (Summer 2022), this book brings to a contemporary audience the trials and tribulations of a key participant in the male-dominated art world in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucy Wertheim's discerning eye and business acumen helped to propel big names such as Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Cedric Morris, Henry Moore and Frances Hodgkins into the mainstream. With three commissioned essays - the first by Frances Spalding (Lucy Wertheim - Her Gallery in Context); the second by Ariane Banks (Lucy Wertheim - A Pioneering Woman and Her Contemporaries); the third by Towner's Collections & Exhibitions Curator, Karen Taylor (Lucy Wertheim - Her 'Forty-One Year Experiment' [1930-71]) - this new edition not only brings Lucy Carrington Wertheim's words and deeds back into our conscience, but it also publishes over 70 artworks, many of which are featured in the Towner exhibition, as well as newly photographed ephemera from the Estate's extensive archive. Together, this exhibition and book will significantly reset the accepted narrative, and shine a light on a neglected corner of mid-twentieth century art history.